Psyco

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Psyco
Developed by	Armin Rigo
Latest release	1.6 / December 16, 2007
OS	Cross-platform
Genre	just-in-time compiler for Python
License	MIT License
Website	http://psyco.sourceforge.net

Not to be confused with Psycho (disambiguation).

Psyco is a specializing just-in-time compiler for Python developed by Armin Rigo.

Currently, Psyco runs on the various BSD flavors, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows based 32-bit Intel-compatible processors and is feature complete, so no further development is expected to take place. A follow-up project to Psyco is PyPy, which will incorporate an interpreter, and a compiler (which can generate C, making it more cross-platform than Psyco) both written in Python, whereas Psyco was written in C and generated only x86. (The interpreter is actually written in a subset of Python, called RPython)

1 Speed enhancement
2 See also
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Speed enhancement

Psyco can noticeably speed up CPU-bound applications. The actual speedup depends greatly on application and varies from slight slowdown (quite rare) to 40x speedup (also quite rare).^[1]

Speedup is approximately 8x, making Python performance close to compiled languages as Smalltalk, Scheme, but still slower than other compiled or JITted languages as C#, Java, Fortran or C.^[2]