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In my experience, "script" is usually well-correlated with "a bit of inefficiency is okay." There's a reason that, say, many UNIX commands that could be implemented as scripts (true, false, yes) are actually implemented as binaries. There's a reason that most commercial UNIXes/clones (Solaris, macOS, Ubuntu, RHEL, etc.) switched from a script-based startup mechanism to a C-program-based one.

I certainly write and continue to write Python scripts where even an extra half second won't matter. It's doing some manipulation of data where the cost of what it's doing is dominated by loading the data (e.g., grabbing it from some web service), and even if the script is small and quick, it's not so small and quick that I'll notice 50-100 ms being shaved off of it.

Use cases where CPython continues to make sense to me are non-CGI web applications and things like Ansible, where load time isn't sensitive to milliseconds and runtime performance is pretty good. (Although if you believe the PyPy folks, perhaps everything that's PyPy-compatible should be running on PyPy.)




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