This is really not fair to python. It has issues with saving a large amount of data as it needs to store additional info about the types. Also it's not optimized for recursion, as it prioritizes readability of its traceback errors.

That said, it's a bit suspicious that you wrote the function tail-recursively. Some languages (I think Rust included) can optimize such functions to avoid the recursive calls and greatly optimize their execution. Again, Python specifically doesn't do this.

So it seems like you targeted a specific weakness here.