[dagw]

People have. See PyPy and Pythran for two examples currently under active development. Instagram has such a project as well that they recently released. I know there have been others. None of them seem to catch on. It seems that most people don't actually want a faster subset of python. They want either all of python or none of python (by switching to another language all together)

[coliveira]

Pypy is not really practical. It requires you to stop using many features of Python. What Python needs is a fast subset that is supported within the main implementation.

[marky1991]

What do you mean? Pypy supports all of python. (not necessarily all of the C API, but that's somewhat a WIP and somewhat a result of the overly-expansive C API.)

[mumblemumble]

I'm not and have never been a game developer, but I think that a decent analogy here might be how many game studios write the core engine in C++, and then do a lot of the high level game logic and scripting in an interpreted language such as Lua or their own dialect of lisp.

I would guess that there's a clear separation of responsibilities, and each of the two languages is very well-suited to what it's being used for. There's not really a whole lot of anxiety about getting Lua (or whatever) to pull out all the stops you see in a compiler like SBCL or interpreter like V8, because these communities were never looking for a single language that could cover all uses cases in the first place. To steal an analogy I used the other day from myself, I'm guessing they don't want a spork all that badly because they're plenty happy with using a fork and a spoon.

That's how the community of people doing scientific computing and suchlike in Python tends to feel about things, too.