When Guido was the BDFL (but whom am I fooling, everyone still will blindly accept a PEP from him and his opinion will still weigh a ton, steering council or not), he was pretty actively against any kind of bytecode-level optimization even though a lot could be done that way, citing “simplicity” and “readability”. Most Python core developers have had pretty much a Pavlovian response to shut down any and all such discussions.
I think they could get away with it for a while because none of the competing implementation would readily steal Python’s darlings, namely NumPy/SciPy and Tensorflow. Now there is competition, and it can really push CPython away to being a niche “reference implementation”, thus we are seeing these twitches.
The track record of CPython core team in the last decade makes me very wary when it comes to bringing in such features. Ship it or it didn’t happen.
P. S. Microsoft once threw a large sum of money at Kenneth Reitz to work on Requests, anyone remembers how that story ended?
