Just to give some more context: in my experience, both import time and memory use tend to be real issues in large Python codebases (code size less so), and I think that the relative efficiency of PEP 563 is an important feature. If PEP 649 can't be made more efficient, this could be a major regression for some users. Python server applications need to run multiple processes because of the GIL, and since code objects generally aren't shared between processes (GC and reference counting makes it tricky, I understand), code size increases tend to be amplified on large servers. Even having a lot of RAM doesn't necessarily help, since a lot of RAM typically implies many CPU cores, and thus many processes are needed as well.

I can see how both PEP 563 and PEP 649 bring significant benefits, but typically for different user populations. I wonder if there's a way of combining the benefits of both approaches. I don't like the idea of having toggles for different performance tradeoffs indefinitely, but I can see how this might be a necessary compromise if we don't want to make things worse for any user groups.

Jukka