[trotterdylan]

Although Grumpy is compiled, it is just as dynamic as Python, in that method dispatch involves dictionary lookups, etc.

The main reason why Grumpy's slower for most single threaded benchmarks is that most Python workloads involve creating and freeing a bunch of small Python objects. In Go, these objects are garbage that need to be GC'd in a very general way. In CPython, there are free lists, arenas and other optimizations for allocating small (especially immutable) objects. And cleaning up garbage in CPython involves pushing unreferenced objects back onto the free lists for later reuse.

[naasking]

> Although Grumpy is compiled, it is just as dynamic as Python, in that method dispatch involves dictionary lookups, etc.

Right, I suppose I assumed that straightforward numerical-looking code would be translated to Go numerical code. Perhaps they just aren't that ambitious yet.

[trotterdylan]

We hope to implement optimizations like you're describing eventually. But the core functionality needs a lot of work before we start down that path.