Shed Skin Python-to-C++ Compiler 0.0.21, Help needed

[John Nagle]

Mark Dufour wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have recently released version 0.0.20 and 0.0.21 of Shed Skin, an
> optimizing Python-to-C++ compiler. Shed Skin allows for translation of
> pure (unmodified), implicitly statically typed Python programs into
> optimized C++, and hence, highly optimized machine language. Besides
> many bug fixes and optimizations, these releases add the following
> changes:
 >
> I'm also
> hoping someone else would like to deal with integration with CPython
> (so Shed Skin can generate extension modules, and it becomes easier to
> use 'arbitrary' external CPython modules such as 're' and 'pygame'.)

    Reusing precompiled external modules will be tough.  Even
CPython has trouble with that.  But that's just a conversion
problem.  Maybe SWIG (yuck, but it exists) could be persuaded
to cooperate.

    For regular expressions, here's an implementation, in C++,
of Python-like regular expressions.

	http://linuxgazette.net/issue27/mueller.html

    That might be a way to get a regular expression capability into
Shed Skin quickly.

> Finally, there may be some interesting Master's thesis subjects in
> improving Shed Skin, such as transforming heap allocation into stack-
> and static preallocation, where possible, to bring performance even
> closer to manual C++. Please let me know if you are interested in
> helping out, and/or join the Shed Skin mailing list.

    Find out where the time is going before spending it on that.

    A good test: BeautifulSoup.  Many people use it for parsing
web pages, and it's seriously compute-bound.

     				John Nagle