Antonio Cuni (principal engineer at Anaconda, author of SPy, developer of PyScript and PyPy, co-founder of the HPy project, and creator of PDB++, Fancy Completer, and VMProf) shares why Python is slow and how SPy, a new statically compiled variant of Python, aims to be as fast as C while staying as Pythonic as Python. We discuss the trade-off between dynamic features and performance, how SPy's "red and blue" code model replaces best-effort JIT with predictable errors, why PyPy struggles with C extensions, and what "Pythonic" really means.

Outline

00:00 - Episode highlights and introduction

00:40 - Why is Python so slow?

01:31 - Would a static Python be fast?

02:13 - What is SPy?

02:28 - What motivated you to create SPy? (Spoiler: frustration)

03:52 - Which ideas from PyPy and HPy went into SP ...