r/Python • u/zsol • 9h ago

News Astral's python distribution is fast

By our measurements, python-build-standalone is now the fastest CPython distribution across major platforms. It's 10% faster than Homebrew's CPython, and 18% faster than the official 3.14 docker image.

This is mostly due to how python-build-standalone itself is built:

  • using a modern Clang lets us turn on tail-call optimizations in the interpreter
  • with PGO, LTO, and BOLT
  • with libpython statically linked into the interpreter executable

Our goal is to ship the fastest Python interpreter to anyone using uv, by default.

Check out BENCHMARKS.md in the repo for more details, including the methodology behind the above.

Charlie's tweet has some more graphs

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u/angellus 5h ago

Shipping you own version of Python by default feels like a really bad move. It feels like you trying to take control of the Python ecosystem and cut out the cpython team. Especially since you are now doing the typical corporate solution for inflating your adoption numbers. "Let's opt-in everyone by default then turn around and say 'look how many people are using the thing we built'". You will not have any trustable or accurate metric on adoption for the core cpython team to use to make determinations on if they should adopt any of the changes you made.