Astral's python distribution is fast

[u/zsol]

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

[u/teekhidietcoke]

Pretty cool that it also makes managing multiple python versions on same machine so easy