https://github.com/graalvm/graalpython https://www.python.org/download/alternatives/ GraalPython is an implementation on the Truffle VM, by Oracle Labs. The Truffle VM gives Python high-performance interoperability with other languages- including JVM, LLVM, Ruby, and JavaScript. The Truffle VM is an "AST Interpreter," which I think means that it executes an interpreter over AST nodes, then compiles and inlines those nodes to machine code as necessary. By default, Truffle VM with the Graal JIT enabled. The Graal JIT compiles the AST down to machine code. My personal experiences with the Truffle JavaScript show that it uses significantly more memory than V8, while having lower performance on pure JavaScript. This might be different for GraalPython, however. Converting a JavaScript data structure into a C struct allowed computation-intensive JavaScript code to use ~30% less cpu power. I don't really know if this is already possible in Python through Python's built-in C extensions. (Since CPython still has to go through its normal dot attribute lookup machinery, I'd imagine the performance benefits of converting a Python class to a C struct would be little.) TL;DR: GraalPython is a Python implementation with a JIT, an easy way to add C extensions, and an easily extensible AST interpreter.