The aim is to offer the speed of C or C++ while retaining the user-friendly feel of Python itself.
These kind of claims always annoy me. Like, sure, there's some room for interpretation there, but at the end of the day, C, C++ and also Rust achieve their speed by having handling baked into the semantics for:
- non-GC memory management
- passing by-reference vs. by-value
- and in the case of Rust, also for handling multi-threaded processing.
Unless he comes up with a revolutionary new memory management strategy, or achieves a massive jump in static analysis to replace human intelligence, then you simply can't achieve similar speed while keeping the semantics of Python.