It's a microbenchmark and skews numbers unnecessarily. Here's the code https://github.com/python/pyperformance/blob/main/pyperformance/data-files/benchmarks/bm_unpack_sequence/run_benchmark.py Here's an example benchmark run https://github.com/faster-cpython/benchmarking-public/blob/main/results/bm-20240330-3.13.0a5%2B-790b1f8-JIT/bm-20240330-pythonperf2-x86_64-brandtbucher-justin_align-3.13.0a5%2B-790b1f8-vs-base.md . Unpack_sequence is the clear outlier here.