A talk given at PyCon Argentina 2009 by Collin Winter (Google)

September 5, 2009

An optimization branch of CPython, intended to be fully compatible and significantly faster.

We want to make Python faster, but we also want to make it easy for large, well-established applications to switch to Unladen Swallow.

1. Produce a version of Python at least 5x faster than CPython.
2. Python application performance should be stable.
3. Maintain source-level compatibility with CPython applications.
4. Maintain source-level compatibility with CPython extension modules.
5. We do not want to maintain a Python implementation forever; we view our work as a branch, not a fork.


code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/