(Shed Skin is an experimental (restricted-)Python-to-C++ compiler.)
Minilight is an elegant minimal global illumination renderer, or raytracer, that uses triangle primitives and an octree spatial index. The original version consists of about 1,000 lines of C++, but there are several translations available at the homepage, such as ~500 line OCaml and Python versions. The Python version apparently clocks in 173 times later than the C++ version, while the OCaml version is only about 3 times slower.. Wouldn't it be interesting if we could make the Python version run faster than the OCaml version?
After some small changes (splitting up some dynamic variables, replacing calls to 'map', 'type'..), and applying some minor fixes to Shedskin, I was able to compile the Python version to C++ using Shedskin SVN. For the basic Cornell box example, it runs about 35 times faster than the modified Python version (which should again be a bit faster than the original Python version). It's probably still somewhat slower than the OCaml version, but not that much. To try to compile it yourself, you'll probably want to have more than 512 MB of RAM, and use the 'shedskin -i' option. The modified version can be found in /examples/minilight in SVN.
I'm guessing that the Python version can be made a bit faster in itself. What typically happens then is that the C++ version will get relatively even faster, because certain bottlenecks that don't really slow down Python will slow down C++ (such as allocating lots of objects). If you'd like to try and help beat OCaml, I'd be very interested in hearing about potential improvements (where readability doesn't suffer too much, obviously.)
Another program that I managed to compile, while much smaller, is one that solves a well-known chess puzzle. To compile knight2.py, I had to replace the 'key' argument to 'sorted' with a 'cmp' version (as 'key' is not yet supported), and fix a small bug in Shedskin ("'%*d' % (2, 7)" and such did not work yet.)
I'm always interested in hearing about other interesting test cases for Shedskin, as they seem hard to come by. Please also consider sending in bug reports. Both types of feedback are essential for me to keep working on Shedskin!
Update: After some tweaking, it is now more than 60 times faster than the original here. See the comments for more information.
Update 2: I removed the -i option with Shedskin 0.1.1, so it is not necessary anymore.
