[mikeash]

That’s the sort of speed that has game developers, who can tolerate occasional pauses without getting anybody killed (although I’m sure some gamers act like they’re dying when it happens), avoiding memory allocations and tuning garbage collectors. That’s similar to how often the render callback for audio code will run, code where you carefully avoid taking locks or calling most system APIs and write the whole thing in C or simple C++ so implicit behaviors don’t result in audible glitches.

Python is good for many things (my whole web site runs on it) but it’s completely unsuitable for this job.