[canucker2016]

Don't forget that there was a Google attempt at making a faster Python - Unladen Swallow. It got lots of PR but never merged with mainline CPython (wikipedia says a dev branch was released).

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unladen_Swallow

[pansa2]

Unladen Swallow got a lot of hype but was only a very small project. IIRC the only people working on it were two interns.

V8 was a much higher priority - Google hired many of the world’s best VM engineers to develop it.

[pjmlp]

Some of them like Lars Bak, have background up to Self VM, which is a language much more dynamic than Python.

Anything goes regarding changing object shapes, it is one step further than Smalltalk in language plasticity.