According to ZDNet, speed in Core Python (CPython) is one of the reasons why other implementations have emerged, such as Pyston. 

In a contribution to the U.S. PyCon Language Summit this week, van Rossum posted a document on Microsoft-owned GitHub detailing some of his ambitions to make Python a faster language, promising to double its speed in Python 3.11 — one of three Python branches that will emerge next year in a pre-alpha release.

Van Rossum was "given the freedom to pick a project" at Microsoft and adds that he "chose to go back to my roots".

"This is Microsoft's way of giving back to Python", writes van Rossum.

Van Rossum said that Vole had stumped up some cash for a small Python team to "take charge of performance improvements"' 

He says that the main beneficiaries of upcoming changes to Python will be those running "CPU-intensive pure Python code" and users of websites with built-in Python.

The faster CPython project "has a GitHub repository which includes a fork of CPython as well as an issue tracker for ideas and tools for analysing performance".

According to Van Rossum, there will be no long-lived forks/branches and more than 6,000 line pull requests. Everything will be open-source, because that is the way that Micrsoft rolls these days.