Exciting changes for python

> Frankly, I don't know what it is with you people.

Which "people" are those, exactly?

> I've been programming in Python, mostly web stuff, for many years now, and its performance is usually not something I seem to need to worry a lot about

There are many, many more workloads than yours.

Here's an example. Several years ago I inherited a bit of python2 code that fired off a bunch of external commands and parsed the output to generate a data file that was consumed by a PHP dashboard-type web application. It typically took about ~30s to run. When self-respecting Linux distros finally dropped python2, it needed to be ported to something more modern. Unfortunately the input was not unicode-clean, which made python3 very unhappy, so in frustration I said "screw this" and rewrote it in perl. Despite being algorithmically identical, the runtime dropped to about 3s -- a literal order of magnitude faster.

This vast improvement in runtime performance allowed me to move to a synchronous invocation instead of asynchronous (with state tracking and the other complexity that entailed), resulting in an overall system that was simpler, more robust, and more performant.

Python definitely has its strengths. But it also has its weaknesses.