Python's Steering Council has formally asked the JIT compiler project to pause development.
The announcement came via an official post on the Python discussion forum, authored by the Steering Council — the five-member body that holds final authority over CPython's direction. The JIT compiler was introduced as an experimental feature in CPython 3.13, designed to speed up Python execution by compiling bytecode to native machine code at runtime, with no code changes required from developers. It shipped behind a compile-time flag and was not enabled by default. The Steering Council's request does not elaborate publicly on specific reasons, but a pause at this level of governance signals that something — technical, organizational, or both — has not cleared the bar.
Python's performance gap against Go, Rust, and even modern JavaScript runtimes has become a recurring argument against the language for compute-heavy work. The JIT was the most structurally credible answer the core team had offered. Stalling it, even temporarily, weakens Python's ability to claim momentum on that front at a moment when the ecosystem is leaning harder on native-speed execution as a selling point.
"Asked to pause" is doing a lot of diplomatic work in that sentence — history suggests these polite timeouts sometimes turn into quiet cancellations, and the Python community will be watching closely to see which this is.