Brandt Bucher

Despite their reputation, just-in-time compilers are not magic “go faster” machines. Developing and maintaining any sort of optimizing compiler for even a single platform, let alone all of Python’s most popular supported platforms, is an incredibly complicated, expensive task.

CPython is a programming language implementation that is mostly maintained by volunteers, but has a huge, diverse user base spread across a wide variety of platforms.

Python 3.11 was released on October 24th, bringing with it a new "specializing, adaptive interpreter" . As one of the engineers who works on this ambitious project, my goal is to introduce you to the fascinating way that your code now optimizes itself as it's running, and to explore the different techniques employed under-the-hood to make your programs 25% faster on average.

Python 3.10 was released on October 4th, bringing with it a major new feature: "structural pattern matching" . As one of the designers of the feature and its principal implementer, my goal is to introduce you to Python's powerful, dynamic, object-oriented approach to this long-established functional programming construct, and to explore ways that you might use structural pattern matching in...