Hello all, As Bearophile pointed out, I have just released Shed Skin 0.0.8. For those of you that do not know Shed Skin, it is an optimizing Python-to-C++ compiler, that allows for translation of pure (unmodified) Python programs into optimized machine language. The speed of generated code is typically 2-40 times, 12 on average, faster than when using Psyco, and 2-220 times, 45 on average, than when using CPython, for a sizeable set of benchmarks (such as a raytracer, chess player, othello player, neural network sim, sat solver, several sudoku solvers..) See http://mark.dufour.googlepages.com for a more detailed introduction to Shed Skin, its current limitations, and a link to my Master's Thesis, which contains more precise results and an explanation of how the compiler works.
Now that I have released a fairly clean and stable (but still very much alpha!) version of my compiler, I would like to invite other people to join the project. Seeing that the SoC application deadline for this year is only in about a week (:P), this would be a nice way to help out and get started in SS development. Note that I did a SoC project on SS last year, which has improved it tremendously. Two important aspects that still need to be investigated are memory optimizations (e.g. transforming heap allocation into stack- and static preallocation), more efficient string support (rather than using the inefficient C++ STL string type) and looking at integration with the standard library and calling compiled code from Python. Note that especially memory optimizations would also be an interesting Master's Thesis topic. Again, see http://mark.dufour.googlepages.com for more details about possible ways to help out. Please let me know if you are even remotely interested :-) Otherwise, a simple way to also help out, is to send me bug reports of small code fragments that SS does not compile correctly, or you can just send me complete programs. Bug reports are always motivating, make my work more time-efficient, and are the best way to getting your own programs supported. Thanks. Mark. -- "How should I know if it works? That's what beta testers are for. I only coded it." - Linus Torvalds -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list