[bakal]

Then how come that there have been so many forks focused on speed yet none has managed to get good enough?

[anakaine]

Good enough in what way, specifically? Python is exceptionally popular not because of speed, but because of its wide compatibility, extensive list of maintained libraries, good learning paths, and most likely because its fast enough for most things.

Every iteration of Python for some time now has added a not insignificant speed boost. It's not as fast as C, and nor will it be given how it works, but it certainly is fast enough for a great many situations and tasks.

All of the above doesn't make it the right tool for every job. Sometimes you need to hit a nail, and you don't have a hammer but you do have a lump of hardwood. And in that situation, you make an assessment if in the long term you need to hit more nails regularly so you invest in a hammer, or just occasionally and you're ok with the lump of wood. It's subjective.

So is it good enough? Good enough for what?

[thehappypm]

The speed of the programming language, in many applications, is a lot less relevant than the overall architecture. For example if you’re running a Web server and you’re serving a request through some hyper optimized C program, that is “fast”. But using a CDN in front of a slow Python server is almost always going to be faster for end users. Point is, the application is often just one part of a system. Python might let you develop quickly and avoid footguns, and having one slow link in the system doesn’t mean the system as a whole is gonna suck