CPython is a programming language implementation that is mostly maintained by volunteers, but has a huge, diverse user base spread across a wide variety of platforms. These factors present a difficult set of challenges and tradeoffs when making design decisions, especially those related to just-in-time machine code generation.

As one of the engineers working on Microsoft's ambitious "Faster CPython" project, I'll introduce our prototype of "copy-and-patch", an interesting technique for generating high-quality template JIT compilers. Along the way, I'll also cover some of the important work in recent CPython releases that this approach builds upon, and how copy-and-patch promises to be an incredibly attractive tool for pushing Python's performance forward in a scalable, maintainable way.