Links    

Psyco is hosted on SourceForge. Go to the SourceForge project page.

Among the related projects, Psyco's unique features are that it works on standard unmodified Python code, and never uses a C compiler.

• Pyrex lets you write code that mixes Python and C data types any way you want, and compiles it into a C extension for Python. This is a compile-time tool that uses programmer annotations in the Python source to produce a more efficient C version of your code, which you then compile with a regular C compiler.

• Weave is a tool for inline C/C++ in Python. The basic functionality lets you write C or C++ code in the middle of your Python program. It calls (and thus requires) a C/C++ compiler at run-time. On top of this you will also find functions that directly accept Python Numeric expression, or that build a regular C extension module for static compilation.

Here are a couple of non-Pythonic dynamic compilation projects. I am often pointed to them as potentials back-ends for Psyco, to help make Psyco portable beyond the current x86 machine code. However, I consider them as not really suited for Psyco. The problem is that they all assume things about the way the code will be emitted, e.g. that we emit a whole function at a time. This model does not suit Psyco at all, where I need all the time to write a small portion of a function, run it, then compile the sequel, and so on. This said, I believe that e.g. a Dynamo-based project could indeed give very good results if applied to Python. This would just be a different project: Psyco does not really work like that. It is indirectly based on the general notion of partial evaluation.

• vcode is a very fast dynamic code generation system.

• Dynamo is a dynamic compiler and optimizer.

• GNU lightning is a simple library for dynamic code generation.

• Self is a dynamic language for which quite some research has been done on optimization.