100% or even 200% seems nice, but at least at the time when I compared with JavaScript it was 4200% faster than would have been needed. Let's not even mention go.
At least for now it seems that Python can still only be used to call some Pascal or cuda bindings if one needs performance
Back in the 2000's I was on a startup whose main language was Tcl, and we would write C extensions for any performance critical command.
The experience lead me to avoid any language without JIT or AOT, unless forced upon me.
Hence why I have used Python since version 1.6 only for OS scripting tasks.
I don’t know the timeline off-hand but I’m guessing this was before Tcl 8, at a time when everything in Tcl was a string not only logically, but also in the actual VM? There’s a whole chasm of implementation tradeoffs between that and a straight-up JIT.
Tcl 8 was just released, and yes we were using it, it hardly mattered that much.
Our product was inspired by AOLServer and Vignette, providing similar kind of capabilities, we had Rails in Tcl, but we were not a famous SV startup, rather mostly serving the Portuguese market.
The founders then went on to create OutSystems, built on top of .NET and Java, nowadays using other stacks, while offering the same kind of RAD tooling.
Starmedia (Periscopio) by chance?
Intervento, acquired by EasyPhone in 1999, which alongside other acquisitions became Altitude Software in 2000.
The platform was originally called Safelayer, and later renamed for Altitude Software consulting projects.
PyPy is average 4x faster yet 95% of python community ignored. Its already feature parity to 3.12 and most of the pypi libs works.