[zahlman]

For what it's worth, I didn't notice a difference between my distro-provided Python 3.12 and the one I built from source - and enabling profile-guided optimization made only a slight difference. I haven't tested with the precompiled versions uv uses, so they could be slower for some reason, but I doubt it. On the other hand, my hardware is rather old, so maybe newer machines allow for significant optimizations that the system version wouldn't have. But I still kinda doubt it.

If performance is important to you, the ancient advice to profile bottlenecks and implement important parts in C where you can, still applies. Or you can try other implementation like PyPy.