ANN: Shed Skin 0.2, an experimental (restricted) Python-to-C++ compiler

[Mark Dufour]

Hi all,

I have just released version 0.2 of Shed Skin, an experimental
(restricted) Python-to-C++ compiler (http://shedskin.googlecode.com).
It comes with 7 new example programs (for a total of 40 example
programs, at over 12,000 lines) and several important improvements/bug
fixes. See http://code.google.com/p/shedskin/wiki/ReleaseNotes for the
full changelog.

The new example programs consist of Disco, an elegant go player (see
http://shed-skin.blogspot.com/2009/07/disco-elegant-python-go-player.html),
a larger Voronoi implementation at 800 lines, a TSP algorithm
simulating ant colonies, a nicer neural network algorithm and three
compressors (Lempel-Ziv, huffman block, and arithmetic).

Other than bug fixes for these programs, this release adds some
important optimizations. First and foremost, inlining was greatly
improved, resulting in potential speedups across the board. Second,
loops such as 'for a, b in enumerate/zip(sequence[, sequence])' should
now be dramatically faster (also inside list comprehensions), by
avoiding allocation of intermediate tuples. Finally, basic list
slicing should now be much faster.
 	

Please try it out!
Mark Dufour.
-- 
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code"
- Ken Thompson