[$] Making CPython faster

Over the last month or so, there has been a good bit of news surrounding the idea of increasing the performance of the CPython interpreter. At the 2021 Python Language Summit in mid-May, Guido van Rossum announced that he and a small team are being funded by Microsoft to work with the community on getting performance improvements upstream into the interpreter—crucially, without breaking the C API so that the ecosystem of Python extensions (e.g. NumPy) continue to work. Another talk at the summit looked at Cinder, which is a performance-oriented CPython fork that is used in production at Instagram. Cinder was recently released as open-source software, as was another project to speed up CPython that originated at Dropbox: Pyston.