Pyston started out as a fork of CPython and was very promising during its early days as a Dropbox project for delivering on high performance Python. Its performance was great but in 2017 Dropbox stopped supporting it . Then at the end of 2020, Pyston reappeared and Pyston 2.0 promoted ~20% faster performance than Python 3.8. Pyston 2.x was developed by many of the original developers from Dropbox now out working on their own firm.

Fast forward to now, Pyston 2.1 was released on Friday. Pyston 2.1 delivers bug fixes and small improvements over Pyston 2.0 that shipped at the end of October. There is a generic Pyston 2.1 binary as well as Ubuntu 16.04/18.04/20.04 builds.

Unfortunately, as with Pyston 2.0, there are currently no sources available for Pyston 2.1 but just these binary builds. The Pyston start-up seems to still be figuring out their game plan and as such for now their GitHub repository is just hosting a README and the binary downloads.

Those interested in trying out Pyston 2.1 can do so via GitHub . We'll see how this Pyston 2.x effort pans out but at least for now great to see continued interest by many parties in advancing the performance of Python interpreters.