For me the corollary of this post should be, try PyPy. You may get a 10x speedup for free.
My point, which apparently it wasn't evident enough, is that you can get the most of the benefits by doing nothing, just trying a different Python implementation, without the hassle of learning a niche language, as easy as it might be.
BTW, if you take into account compilation times the difference is even meager, and in all fairness the PyPy warmup period should have had to be discounted.