KTSimage / Getty Images At the Python Language Summit held at PyCon 2021 this week, Python language creator Guido van Rossum unveiled near-term and long-term plans for making Python faster—anywhere from two to five times faster, and possibly more. The Python language already has many ways to run faster, from alternate runtimes like PyPy to wrapping modules written in C/C++. But almost none of these methods involves speeding up CPython itself—the reference implementation of Python, written in C, that is the most widely used version of the language. [ The short-term plan is to add at least one major set of performance improvements to Python 3.11, now officially under development as an alpha-level project. Python 3.11 is slated for release in 2022.