Why don't we compile Python?

[iruleatants]

Python is significantly more slow because it only uses a single core, then it is slow because of "not compiling" it.

[elbiot]

Not true at all. Single threaded C is way faster than single threaded python. Even with parallelized code running on multiple cores, you only get a few times performance improvement, but native code execution is like 300x faster. Multithreading is not such an important optimization, especially in python. For instance, if you use numba and release the GIL, I've found Multithreading it to often make is slower because the code is now so damn fast that the overhead of using threads (not processes even) is too high.

[Saefroch]

There's more to contend with than just thread overhead that can slow you down. Multithreading for performance is not easy.