I’ve spent some time optimizing Python performance in a web app and CLI, and yeah it absolutely sucks.

Module import cost is enormous, and while you can do lots of cute tricks to defer it from startup time in a long-running app because Python is highly dynamic, for one-time CLI operations that don’t run a daemon or something there’s just nothing you can do.

I really enjoy Python as a language and an ecosystem, and feel it very much has its place…which is absolutely not anywhere that performance matters.

EDIT: and there’s a viable alternative. Python is the ML language.