Here are some topics that fit into the NeedForSpeed theme. You can add additional topics below.

Please discuss the specific goals and possible approaches to these problems!

CPython

• Implement PEPs for optimizing global and attribute lookups

  • [http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0266/]

  • [http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0267/]

  • [http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0280/]

• Implement faster floating point ops
• Implement portions of decimal module in C
• Struct module improvements (e.g. struct.compile, struct.finditer)
• Create a string variant that provides lazy slicing without copying
• Allow selective removal of unused features (e.g. profiling support)
• Faster parsing of strings and bytes into int, long, etc.
• Buffer for use with network i/o
• More collections
  • ordered dictionary
  • alternate list optimized for fast insertion and deletion
  • red/black tree
  • pivot tables
  • skip list

• Create a 64 bit PyInt type (for 32 bit machines)

• Optimize str object methods
• Add itertools.imerge() and itertools.izip_longest()

Pure Python Projects

• Improve language shootout submissions

  • http://dada.perl.it/shootout/python.html

• Extend webbrowser.py to provide more control
• Improve the API for timeit.py
• Build extensions to the time module to enhance timezone support

• Improve PythonPerformanceTips

Twisted

• Speed improvements to select and poll reactors
• Reactor based on /dev/epoll
• Better integration with psyco
• Improvements against twisted benchmark

Psyco

• Support for generator expressions
• Support for nested scopes
• Support for more dictionary operations
• Speedup float arithmetic
• Support for more built-ins (e.g. int(), long(), float(), etc.)
• Upgrade for python 2.5
• Better tools for profiling psyco-ness of application
• Investigate usefulness of IVM (with aim to producing a more streamlined dispatch loop)
• LLVM backend
• Virtualised longs (for long longs)

• Virtualised slots (Ability to cache getattribute() values)

PyPy

• JIT compiler
• LLVM backend
• RPython extension modules for CPython