[zbentley]

> There is so much pointer indirection internal to CPython.

This cannot be overstated. Really, truly, forget everything you know about cache locality when doing even basic "for-each: add numbers together"-type things in Python.

That's not an indictment; such indirection is par for the course for scripting languages, and enables a lot of features and dynamism. Additionally, the cost of that indirection may go down over time thanks to interpreter optimizations like the JIT: https://tonybaloney.github.io/posts/python-gets-a-jit.html