About Core Python
Core Python encompasses projects that affect the core infrastructure, libraries and CPython.
Python is a popular high-level programming language. It is a general-purpose language used by scientists, developers, and many others who want to get things done quickly and effectively. In this spirit, our primary project this year is about helping make Python faster! Python is a language that can be interpreted and implemented in different ways. The reference implementation of Python is CPython, so named because it's written in C. But it's not the only option! PyPy is an implementation of Python written in Python that prides itself on great performance. Jython is a Python implementation that compiles Python code to Java bytecode. IronPython is an implementation of Python for the .NET framework. And there are others.
Getting Started
The website to help you get started in Core Python development is http://pythonmentors.com/.
Since this year's project is focused on performance, you should probably Take a look at the PyPy benchmarks and the Grand Unified Benchmarks -- what can you learn about the performance of python? Can you run those benchmarks yourself and see if you get similar results? Try comparing your results to another applicant's and see if you both can learn!
Contact info
To chat with the Core Python mentors, please use the core-mentorship@python.org mailing list. Sign up
Want to talk in realtime? You can also ask questions on our IRC channel:
#python-python on irc.freenode.net
Please join us there to chat with your fellow students and mentors! If you're new to IRC, you might want to check out http://www.irchelp.org/
Ideas
Core Python is still getting its ideas page together, please ask on the mailing list if you need more information!