Shed Skin is an experimental compiler, that can translate pure, but implicitly statically typed Python programs into optimized C++. It can generate stand-alone programs or extension modules that can be imported and used from larger Python programs.

Besides the typing restriction, programs cannot freely use the Python standard library (although about 17 common modules, such as random and re, are currently supported). Also, not all Python features, such as nested functions and variable numbers of arguments, are supported.

For a set of 40 non-trivial test programs (at over 12,000 lines in total; see the shedskin-examples-0.2.tgz download), measurements show a typical speedup of 2-40 times over Psyco, and 2-220 times over CPython. Because Shed Skin is still in an early stage of development, however, many other programs will not compile out-of-the-box.

Shed Skin consists of only 6,900 lines of Python code, and about 19,000 lines of C++ code (implementation of builtins and library modules). Unfortunately, there is still only one active developer, so please consider joining the project!