[int_19h]

You'd be surprised at how little speedup you get from simply JIT-compiling the Python bytecode. It's so high-level that most interesting stuff happens in the layers below anyway.

[horizion2025]

But if that is so why this focus on the few clock cycles of dispatch?

[int_19h]

Because it is a fairly easy thing - it's a code transform that's mostly mechanical. And it also improves code quality, unusual for an optimization. So if that nets you those extra few percent, why not?