What are your opinions and expectations on Google's Unladen Swallow? From their project plan:
We want to make Python faster, but we also want to make it easy for large, well-established applications to switch to Unladen Swallow.
- Produce a version of Python at least 5x faster than CPython.
- Python application performance should be stable.
- Maintain source-level compatibility with CPython applications.
- Maintain source-level compatibility with CPython extension modules.
- We do not want to maintain a Python implementation forever; we view our work as a branch, not a fork.
And even sweeter:
In addition, we intend to remove the GIL and fix the state of multithreading in Python. We believe this is possible through the implementation of a more sophisticated GC
It almost looks too good to be true, like the best of PyPy and Stackless combined.
More info:
Update: as DNS pointed out, there was related question: What is LLVM and How is replacing Python VM with LLVM increasing speeds 5x?
I have high hopes for it.
This is being worked on by several people from Google. Seeing as how the BDFL is also employed there, this is a positive.
Off the bat, they state that this is a branch, and not a fork. As such, it's within the realm of possibility that this will eventually get merged into trunk.
Most importantly, they have a working version. They're using a version of unladen swallow right now for Youtube stuff.
They seem to have their shit together. They have a relatively detailed plan for a project at this stage, and they have a list of tests they use to gauge performance improvements and regressions.
I'm not holding my breath on GIL removal, but even if they never get around to that, the speed increases alone make it awesome.