Currently the unpacking of starred values in arguments and the right hand side of assignments is handled in the interpreter without any help from the compiler. The layout of arguments and values is visible to the compiler, so the compiler should do more of the work. We can replace the complex bytecodes used in unpacking with simpler more focused ones. Specifically the collection building operations BUILD_LIST_UNPACK, BUILD_TUPLE_UNPACK, BUILD_SET_UNPACK and BUILD_TUPLE_UNPACK_WITH_CALL can be replaced with simpler, and self-explanatory operations: LIST_TO_TUPLE, LIST_EXTEND, SET_UPDATE In addition, the mapping operations BUILD_MAP_UNPACK and BUILD_MAP_UNPACK_WITH_CALL can be replaced with DICT_UPDATE and DICT_MERGE. DICT_MERGE is like DICT_UPDATE but raises an exception for duplicate keys. This change would not have much of an effect of performance, as the bytecodes listed are relatively rarely used, but shrinking the interpreter is always beneficial.

 New changeset 13bc13960cc83dbd1cb5701d9a59ac9b9144b205 by Mark Shannon in branch 'master': bpo-39320: Handle unpacking of *values in compiler (GH-17984) https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/13bc13960cc83dbd1cb5701d9a59ac9b9144b205 

 New changeset 8a4cd700a7426341c2074a2b580306d2d60ec839 by Mark Shannon in branch 'master': bpo-39320: Handle unpacking of **values in compiler (GH-18141) https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/8a4cd700a7426341c2074a2b580306d2d60ec839 

These changes introduced a regression: bpo-41531 "Python 3.9 regression: Literal dict with > 65535 items are one item shorter".

Does this count as a regression or as an unintended bugfix for evaluation order? https://stackoverflow.com/a/70404659/1658617