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At one point, Google was also interested in pouring lots of money into making Python faster, and they shifted those resources away.

I think what always ends up failing here is that, as others have stated, they won't make breaking API changes, in particular those in charge of driving Python forward are extremely hesitant to break the C API for fear of losing packages that have make Python so popular.

I would imagine, if the leadership was willing to put in the elbow grease to help those key packages along the changes when they happen, they could do it, but I understand that its not always that simple

Meta does some work for this with Cinder, but Meta has a history of language forks, and it's far enough off the beaten track that I wouldn't use it.

cinder team member here - we are putting a lot of work into having cinder converge with rather than diverge from mainline cpython. the main idea is to get support for pluggable JITs into cpython, and then have cinder use those APIs to work as a regular extension module.

Microsoft had the Faster CPython team for several years, and then recently laid off some of the core devs and the team lead.