[6ren]

I wonder how much JIT compilation would help, without any hand-optimization? e.g. it'd do the initial inlining.

I've been amazed at Java's speedup over multiple runs: dead-slow on startup, then improving rapidly over the next 10-20 runs, and even keeps improving slowly after that. It's a bit magical. Much (all?) of that JIT tech should be applicable to Python, I'd think.

BTW: link is to the comments, not the story

[lloeki]

Take a look at PyPy, which goes out of its way to produce incredible results.