Correction. I copied some incorrect values from my test harness. So Honest Python does NOT beat Dishonest Swift.

But it does beat the pants off of JS/TS on V8 which is quite the surprise.

Also in the surprise category is that Honest Java is more than 2x faster than dishonest c++.

The dynamism exists to support the object model. That's the actual dependency. Monkey-patching, runtime class mutation, vtable dispatch. These aren't language features people asked for. They're consequences of building everything on mutable objects with identity.

Strip the object model. Keep Python.

You get most of the speed back without touching a compiler, and your code gets easier to read as a side effect.

I built a demo: Dishonest code mutates state behind your back; Honest code takes data in and returns data out. Classes vs pure functions in 11 languages, same calculation. Honest Python beats compiled C++ and Swift on the same problem. Not because Python is fast, but because the object model's pointer-chasing costs more than the Python VM overhead.

Don't take my word for it. It's dockerized and on GitHub. Run it yourself: honestcode.software, hit the Surprise! button.

The reason this is impressive has less to do with the tolerances themselves and more to do with backward compatibility across decades at scale. That's the genuinely hard part.

The history here is deeper than most people realize. The United States spent fifty years (roughly 1800 to 1853) at the Springfield and Harper's Ferry armories trying to achieve what LEGO now does routinely: parts manufactured to tight enough tolerances that they are truly interchangeable without fitting. In 1853, a visiting British inspector randomly selected ten muskets made in ten different years, disassembled them, mixed the parts, and reassembled ten functional muskets using only a screwdriver. Tolerances of a thousandth of an inch. It was considered impossible by most of the engineering establishment of the time.

The way they got there was by building machines, then using the parts those machines made to build better machines, then using those improved parts to build even better machines. A virtuous circle of transferring skill from human hands to tooling. This is the actual origin story of what historians call the American System of Manufacture, and it's the foundation the entire modern automotive supply chain sits on.

So yes, any competent injection molder holds tight tolerances today. But that's precisely the point: the reason it seems unremarkable now is that two centuries of compounding precision made it so

according to the WaPo, this guy was such a L33T hacker that 'he needed help transferring data from a thumb drive “to his personal computer"'.

Ooookay

I'm sure they are going to have a ball reading through thousands of lines of AI slop.