Python is typically used to build applications that are IO bound. Squeezing more performance out of the interpreter is not going to translate to any real gains for most Python users these days.
Because Python is slow, Python is not used in scenarios where speed is crucial. That much is true.
However, if Python was faster, it would be used in those scenarios, so more people would be using it for speed critical code so it would provide real gains for a great many Python programmers.
This is exactly what happened with JavaScript: before V8 JavaScript was in exactly the same position as Python. Not many people were writing large programs in JavaScript because JavaScript was too slow. V8 sped up JavaScript 10x+ and people started writing much larger apps that do require that speed. If JavaScript speed suddenly dropped to pre-V8 speeds, we would all find the most popular web apps unusably slow.
It's probably worth noting that Google already attempted a V8-like transformation for Python with Unladen Swallow, and that that attempt mostly failed. Perhaps it was just prioritized differently, and that's why V8 was successful and Unladen Swallow wasn't.
I'm curious, what leads you to the conclusion that 'Python is typically used to build applications that are IO bound'? Also, what exactly are you referring to when you say 'IO bound'?
Python is commonly used in web services, where retrieving information from a database and transmitting the results via slow network connections are what takes up the most time, not processing the data in between with Python.
I don't buy that. I've had enough people relate Python's roots in the sysad tool belt and it's application in processing large data sets to believe that it's intended use case could be that limited.
Python is used just about everywhere for just about everything (sometimes properly, sometimes poorly). While there are a lot of web sites that run Python, there are also countless other applications that use it that are unrelated to the web. See Scipy as an example.
That said, the earlier poster mentioning that many people are using Python for IO bound processes is not too far a stretch. Why else would Twisted Python exist, and why would the new Tulip async IO stuff be developed?
I'm not denying that IO is important to a certain class of Python programs too; but I still can't see what leads to the conclusion that IO bound programs are the primary use case for Python. There are enough evented and async io libraries being built for just about every platform right now, that doesn't make IO the center of any of them.
And then there is the GIL. So if you want to squeeze more performance out of your CPU bound task. You need to use the multiprocess module, because Python threading does not work well for CPU bound tasks.
It's also used in CPU intensive applications, but the "standard" numerical libraries (Numpy/SciPy) aren't distributed with the language standard libraries. However, they're FOSS, available pretty much anywhere Python itself is, and anyone doing numerical work with Python will almost certainly use those libraries. They're not distributed with CPython itself in order to avoid being tied to a slower release schedule.
