I'm curious to why they started this project when there already is low hanging fruit that can speed up Python (e.g. pypy). What makes this better other than to satisfy the inner go-fanboy?
It's clear that existing Python codebases will be maintained for the foreseeable future – there would be no reason to build this otherwise – but this may signify a shift away from Python for new extensions to the project, as this now makes it possible to integrate Go packages with relative ease.
> To solve this problem, we investigated a number of other Python runtimes. Each had trade-offs and none solved the concurrency problem without introducing other issues.
Not strictly true, http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/stm.html. In general for the main project however, this is true.