[alayne]

Just because you're in the C runtime, doesn't mean you're doing productive work. If it isn't the bytecode VM that is slow, then why is PyPy able to be much faster in many cases.

In my experience, Python is easily 10-20x slower than a compiled language when doing computational work where you can't just call into a big C function, just like you would expect to see from any interpreter. I won't generally use it for anything data intensive.