WTF is up with python?

x = 0
while x < 100000000:
  x += 1

the above code takes ~35 seconds to run on my computer. WTF???

I'm not all that impressed by Psyco. I've tried in on a real-world app, and once I managed to keep it from crashing, the improvement was a meager 15%.

I had been hoping for ~200%. Ouch.

To be fair, there are a number of things in Python that aren't easy to optimize, but Psyco is excellent evidence that microbenchmarks are close to worthless. :(