> My personal view is that the world has largely moved on from dynamically typed languages for anything non-trivial or that isn't essentially plumbing. For good reason. Of course people will bring up Javascript but it has a captive market as being the only thing that'll universally run code in a browser and the likes of TypeScript can ease that burden anyway.

This is not correct. There is a lot of data analysis code in the research and scientific community written in python. A lot of PyCon attendees and speakers come from these communities. Oftentimes, it’s not easy to write code to perform a task entirely in numpy, and then you incur massive slowdowns (often 20-100x). This is a common and contemporary problem in the python ecosystem.

GVR initially didn’t think that python needed to be faster either, but recently changed his mind. You can find a presentation on his motivations here: https://github.com/faster-cpython/ideas/blob/main/FasterCPyt...

Sam Gross comes out of that community so he’s familiar with the motivations for making raw python faster.