MAKE PYTHON FAST!!!

Either I wasn't interested or my memory is going fast. A few days ago, amid the brouhaha over GvR's thinking aloud on optional static typing - at least I think it was during this time - several bloggers opined that the way forward to faster Python is not to rewrite speed-critical bits in C, but to extend Python with type declarations and/or use type-inferring tools. I can't recall the details, but names like pyrex, psyco, PyPy and Starkiller ring a bell.

This week, the effbot announces cElementTree: "On typical documents, it's 15-20 times faster than the Python version [...] and uses 2-5 times less memory." Several (other) Python bloggers wax lyrical over it; Ryan Tomayko mentions in passing Martijn Faassen's announcement of another ElementTree implementation based on the very fast libxml2.