Python 3.14 Is Here. How Fast Is It? – Miguelgrinberg.com

Summary

In November of 2024 I wrote a blog post titled "Is Python Really That Slow?", in which I tested several versions of Python and noted the steady progress the language has been making in terms of performance. Today is the 8th of October 2025, just a day after the official release of Python 3.14. Let's rerun the benchmarks to find out how fast the new version of Python is! Note: If you do not care about tables and charts with results and just want to read my conclusions, click here to go to the end of the article. A Quick Word On How Misleading Benchmarks Can Be Yes, even though I'm going to share the results of my benchmark, I feel I have to warn you again, like I did in the previous article, that generic benchmarks like this one are not really very useful. Running these benchmarks is fun, and that is why I do it, but it is really impossible to build an accurate performance profile of something as complex as the Python interpreter just from running a couple of silly little scripts. I have designed my tests so that they run only pure Python code, avoiding the use of any dependencies, and in particular any functions that are written in C code. Native code (aside from the Python interpreter itself, that is) is less likely to become faster from one release of Python to the next, so I see no point in including that in the benchmark. But real-world applications do often use a mix of pure Python and native code, be it C, C++ or Rust, so while my test scripts are great to evaluate the performance of pure Python code, I do not consider them to be representative of the applications we normally use. In short, have a look at my benchmark, but consider it just one data point and not the last word on Python performance! The Testing Matrix Here is the test matrix that I've worked with, with five dimensions: 6 Python versions, plus recent versions of Pypy, Node.js and Rust: 3 Python interpreters Standard Just-In-Time (JIT): only for CPython 3.13+ Free-threading (FT): only for CPython...