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What RPython allows one to do is profoundly different to the traditional route. In essence, one writes an interpreter and gets a JIT for free. I suggest rereading that sentence again: it fundamentally changes the economics of language implementation for many of us. To give a rough analogy, it is like moving from manual memory management to automatic garbage collection.
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RPython, to my mind, is an astonishing project. It has, almost single-handedly, opened up an entirely new approach to VM implementation. As my experience shows, creating a decent RPython VM is not a huge amount of work (despite some frustrations). In short: never again do new languages need come with unusably slow VMs. That the the PyPy / RPython team have shown that these ideas scale up to a fast implementation of a large, real-world language (Python) is another feather in their cap.