I have just released Shed Skin 0.0.10. besides several important bug fixes (see test 161), it contains many new error messages for unsupported features and dynamic (sub)types. this should make it much easier to try out Shed Skin and work around basic problems. please try it out and let me know about any problems/successes ^^
in other news, a Shed Skin proposal has again been accepted in this year's Summer of Code. the student will investigate memory optimizations more deeply than I have done for my thesis, and implement both a stack allocation and static preallocation technique. we expect to start discussing the topic on the shed skin mailing list in the coming weeks.
finally, phillip hassey (also a Python SoC mentor) suggested an interesting idea: to automatically create *_.py files from pure C++ library header files, so compiled code can directly use many C++ libraries. this shouldn't be too difficult (the header files contain all type information), and has very interesting potential.. please let me know if you'd like to work on this!