Everything in Python is such a hack that requires shoring up ancient software forever.

But people love the thrill of things not working, as Djikstra already pointed out.

Nice to see the performance improvements work.

This is well-written. I could follow along quite nicely, from the setup through the bottlenecks and onto the resolution of the performance bug. Even the PRs are very pleasant to read: the majority of them is just a handful of changed lines with an added tests and a bit of documentation.

I was taken aback for a moment that this work originated from a report on StackOverflow. I had thought SO was effectively dead and abandoned by its community.