Sprint topics following the NeedForSpeed theme

You can add additional topics below. Please discuss the specific goals and possible approaches to these tasks!

CPython

• Implement PEPs for optimizing global and attribute lookups

  • [http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0266/ PEP 266], [http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0267/ PEP 267], and [http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0280/ PEP 280]

• Can floating point ops be sped-up by avoiding flag/exception checks at every step? Can some floating point ops be in-lined in ceval.c?
• Implement portions of the decimal module in C
• Build-out struct module to support fast, high-volume binary conversions -- perhaps with regexp analogs such struct.compile() and struct.finditer()
• Create a string subclass that provides lazy slicing without copying
• Allow selective removal of unused features such as profiling support
• Faster parsing of strings and bytes into int, long, etc.
• Buffer for use with network I/O
• Build-out the collections module for optimized data structures:
  • ordered dictionary
  • alternate list implementation optimized for fast insertion and deletion
  • red/black tree
  • pivot tables
  • skip list

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

• Optimize methods in stringobject.c
• Add itertools.imerge() and itertools.izip_longest()

Pure Python Projects

• Improve [http://dada.perl.it/shootout/python.html language shootout] submissions

• Improve the API for timeit.py. Guido thinks that much of the intelligence in the command-line interface should be shifted to importable functions.

• Update PythonSpeed/PerformanceTips

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
• Virtualized longs (for long longs)

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

PyPy

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

Py3000

• Make a wishlist for possible performance gains in Py3.0