A Register-Based Python Interpreter for Beter Performance (dl.acm.org)

Sounds too good to be true but the results are impressive - 10% faster python for free with no breaking API changes.

[PDF]

I found a video of someone testing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ2Lfj2hAdk and repo https://github.com/zq1997/RegCPython

Did anyone see the limitations of this implementations?

Usually you only a limited number of registers available, i.e. number of local vars. This is limited by the oparg byte, i.e. 255. So with more than 255 needed local vars you need a fallback to either an extended opcode or a stack opcode. This can be optimized in the compiler to limit the practical number of regs to match the CPU, but you still need a fallback, and I didn't see that mentioned in the paper.

For what it's worth, the CPython core/Faster CPython developers are actively investigating implementations of this idea: https://github.com/faster-cpython/ideas/issues/485 .