We had a chance with ctypes and now CFFI to move away from the platform calcifying cpython module interface that is overly coupled to the cpython runtime. I am very disappointed in the lack of affordances that cpython gives to alternative pythons to support their work. The stdlib is a crufty mess that is overly coupled to cpython as well. The batteries are corroded and need to be swapped out for a modular pack.

I don't think it would be hard to add type annotations to existing projects, though. Something similar happened in the JS world with the transition of JS projects to TypeScript and it wasn't a big deal, IIRC.

No. Pypy already does JIT. And Cython has the speed, but not the size.

The target of my phantasy compiler are microcontrollers. That's why the (correct) comment of quotemstr isn't that big of a concern to me.

Not static AOT, not creating tiny binaries that fit on a microcontroller.

There is a lot of stuff out there that goes in this direction. There is nukita (again no small binaries), there is even an abandoned GCC frontend that can compile some minimal examples, but has been abandoned long ago.

Seriously, the time I spent researching this topic - if a proper compiler engineer would spend that on the actual compiler, it'd be done by now.

For people who don't want to bounce through twitter to get to the home page:

https://nim-lang.org/