With this past week's release of Pyston 2.1 as an alternative Python interpreter I was curious to see how the performance compared to that of upstream Python... So here are some weekend benchmarks with a Ryzen 9 5900X system.

On a Ryzen 9 5900X system running Ubuntu 20.10, I ran a few Python benchmarks using its stock Python 3.8.6 installation, Python 3.9.1 as the latest upstream and built from source in an optimized mode, and then the Pyston 2.1 x86_64 Linux binary. Pyston 2.x still is (sadly) binary-only for now.

All the system details and benchmarks in full can be found over on OpenBenchmarking.org .

With the simply PyBench, Pyston 2.1 was much faster than the upstream Python 3.8/3.9 performance...












And throughout various PyPerformance benchmarks, Pyston 2.1 generally had a demanding lead in these benchmarks from a Ryzen 9 5900X. Again, all the data in full over on OpenBenchmarking.org .

Pyston 2.1 performance is looking great at least from these quick benchmarks but too bad Pyston 2.x is currently not an open-source project.