Python may become lots faster in future releases
Python code can be executed by a few environments, but the reference and most common implementation is CPython. This is what runs your code by default, but is commonly considered slow. There are certainly a lot of options how to speed up your code already, from switching to another interpreter to Cython for instance. But most of us still rely on the default option for best compatibility.
Recently, Mark Shannon from Python Core dev team proposed a plan of how to make CPython execution way faster than currently is. The plan has four iteration, each of which is expected to speed up the execution by roughly 50%.
The main idea is to run the Python code in several tiers, varying in frequency of usage. The more used function, the more optimized that area of code would become.
The project needs a lot of small optimizations in the code execution and Mark Shannon offers to do it himself, but with some paid support. Part of the first iteration is done, as Shannon wrote in a discussion. So, lets hope that at least part of the plan gets implemented in CPython in future releases. Fingers crossed!