I have just released version 0.6 of Shedskin, an experimental (restricted-)Python-to-C++ compiler.
Most importantly, this release finally comes with a substantial scalability improvement. Instead of analyzing a whole program at once, Shedskin now repeatedly analyzes an ever increasing version of the program, starting at nothing, essentially, until the whole program is analyzed. It turns out it this is much easier than analyzing programs as a whole. The result is that Shedskin now easily scales to several test programs of over 1,000 lines (sloccount), and needs much less memory to analyze them.
I'd really like to receive programs that Shedskin 0.6 is unabe to analyze within a reasonable amount of time, to get an idea of the actual extent of the improvement, and to be motivated to further improve things. It's hard to be motivated to improve things if all programs you know of work well!
Interestingly, because of the incremental analysis, it also became possible to add a progress bar to Shedskin. It will slow down as we go to 100 percent, and be somewhat inaccurate if parts of a program turn out to be unused, but I for one couldn't be happier with it.
Another area that has seen substantial improvements is the support for generating extension modules. For example, basic (un)pickling of compiled classes should now work, and inheritance and overloading should now be better exposed to the outside world.
The most important bugfix is probably to correct the module/linenumber information for warnings and errors. It turns out the '#{' feature messed up line numbers, and with code spanning several files, Shedskin would often display the wrong module as well. This should all be fixed now.
More details about the release can be found in the release notes.
I would like to thank the following people for contributing to this release: Hakan Ardo, Thomas Spura, Eric Uhrhane, Saravanan Shanmugham, HartsAntler and Douglas McNeil, as well as Plonjers, for sending in the nice test case that triggered the scalability improvement.
update: Just after the release, Danny Milosavljevic sent in a great 50th example program, a Commodore 64 emulator! The emulator itself is a work in progress, but it boots and you can start typing commands. After modifying it a bit so it compiles out-of-the-box with 0.6, I added it to the 0.6 example tarball.
