Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Shed Skin 0.4

I have just released Shed Skin 0.4, an experimental (restricted-)Python-to-C++ compiler. Thanks again especially to Jeremie Roquet for helping out.

The biggest 'improvement' of this release is perhaps that Windows is no longer supported. Windows users are encouraged to take over maintainership of the MinGW version, or to upgrade to a 'real' operating system, such as Ubuntu, and live in software freedom.

Other improvements include support for generator expressions, real boolean support (instead of integers that print as 0 and 1), support for the 'key' argument of 'min' and 'max', another useful type inference scalability improvement, and support for heapq.{merge, nsmallest, nlargest}. Please see the release notes for the full list of changes.

Four new example programs were also added, for a total of 47 programs:

-pylife, a game of life implementation based on the wonderful hashlife algorithm (David Bau)
-a nice a-star implementation, with a pygame frontend (John Eriksson)
-a simple game of life implementation that gave the type analysis some trouble (Francesco Frassinelli)
-a second genetic algorithm (Stavros Korokithakis)

Please go ahead and try it out, and let me know about any problems. I'm also always very happy to receive new example/test programs to play with, especially if type inference fails (or doesn't terminate) for them!