Projects with code deliverables

1997-1999 Python2C
2002-2011 Psyco, https://bitbucket.org/arigo/psyco
- Was actually used in production for many projects
2002-2010 Pyrex
- Served as a base for Cython
2003, active PyPy
2006 Grant Olson's Compyler
2006, active Cython
- Originally based on Pyrex
2008, active Shedskin
2009-2010 Unladen Swallow
- Postmortem
2011, active Nuitka
2011-2013 [Copperhead]https://github.com/bryancatanzaro/copperhead) - "Data Parallel Python"
- https://devblogs.nvidia.com/copperhead-data-parallel-python/
- https://github.com/bryancatanzaro/copperhead/tree/master/samples
2010-2011 HotPy
2012-2012 HotPy2
- https://sites.google.com/site/makingcpythonfast/
- https://sites.google.com/site/makingcpythonfast/
- https://code.google.com/archive/p/hotpy/
- https://bitbucket.org/markshannon/hotpy_2
2012-2012 pymothoa
- https://code.google.com/archive/p/pymothoa/
- https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEzMDQ
2012-2013 Parakeet
2012, active Numba
- Well-known and actively used, 4.8K github stars, 16K commits
2012, active Pythran
- docs
- 2019-01-24 Pythran: Python at C++ speed !
2012-2018 reticulated
2013-2014 flypy, was once named "numba2" then apparently transforned into pykit
- Related: https://github.com/pykit, https://github.com/ContinuumIO/pykit, https://github.com/flypy/pykit
- Good pitch: https://pypi.org/project/pykit/
2014-2017 https://github.com/darius/tailbiter - Simple teaching metacircular bytecode compiler
- Originally
  for book "500 Lines or Less" (didn't fit)
- 2014-02-24 http://abecedarius.tumblr.com/post/77679122389/ouroborospy
- 2014-03-17 http://abecedarius.tumblr.com/post/79850464139/tail-eaten-well-almost
- 2017-02 Dragon taming with Tailbiter, a bytecode compiler for Python -
2014-2017 Pyston
- 2014-04-03 Announcement
- 2017-01-31 Postmortem
2014-2016 HOPE - "JIT compiler for astrophysical computations"
- paper
2015-2015 https://github.com/lukasmartinelli/py14 - Python to C++ 14 transpiler
2015-2019 numpile - A tiny 1000 line LLVM-based numeric specializer for scientific Python code
- Let's Write an LLVM Specializer for Python!
2015-2016 FAT Python
- https://github.com/vstinner/fatoptimizer
2015, active Pyjion (originally microsoft/Pyjion) - A JIT for Python based upon CoreCLR
2016-2018 Lichen - Explicitly a subset of Python with purposely differing semantics
2017, active mypyc/mypy - Python-to-C
compiler based on type annotations/inference by mypy type checker. (Later
mypyc is merged into mypy codebase).

Academic and theoretical research, and just no code available

1997-2000 PyFront (afterwards Basil)
2000 Basil
- https://sourceforge.net/projects/basil/ - No files, no VCS
- http://wiki.c2.com/?BasilProject
- http://wiki.c2.com/?BasilProjectLog
2002-2003 UCPy compiler + Mamba VM
- UCPy: Reverse-Engineering Python
2004-2004 Starkiller
- Faster than C: Static Type Inference with Starkiller
- Master's Thesis
- Shedskin seems to be based on similar ideas and provides concrete deliverables

Python Conferences and SIGs

1998-11 7th International Python Conference
- From Jon Riehl's notes:
Last year (IPC7,) I thought I was going to surprise the Python community by presenting a prototype Python to C translator. Little did I know, I was only one of three people who announced such a product.
These apparently were:
- "Converting Python Virtual Machine Code to C", John Aycock
- "PyFront: Conversion of Python to C Extension Modules", Jon Riehl
- (3rd - ???)
2000-01 8th International Python Conference
- From Jon Riehl's notes:
This year (IPC8,) in the interest of keeping people up to date, there was a two hour session that hosted the developers of these prototypes. The only system left standing is now complete and under beta test. Bill Tutt and Greg Stein cowrote Python2C, which they have been continuing to work on at (http://www.mudlib.org/~rassilon/p2c/). The other player is John Aycock. John declared he would look into run time type instrumentation, which I think should end up forming some sort of a JIT for Python. He lives at: (http://gulf.uvic.ca/~aycock/)
2000 Compiler-SIG
- "This SIG grew out of a Developers' Day session at the 8th International Python
  Conference. Ka-Ping Yee took
  notes on the session."
2016-07-11 Python Compilers Workshop
at SciPy 2016 conference.

PEPs

PEP 267, 2001-05, Py2.2: Optimized Access to Module Namespaces
PEP 266, 2001-08, Py2.3: Optimizing Global Variable/Attribute Access
PEP 280, 2002-02, Py2.3: Optimizing access to globals
PEP 329, 2004-04, Py2.4: Treating Builtins as Constants in the Standard Library
PEP 510, 2016-01, Py3.6: Specialize functions with guards
PEP 511, 2016-01, Py3.6: API for code transformers

Static Analysis

https://github.com/sdiehl/subpy - Subpy is a library for defining subsets
of the Python language and querying ASTs for language-level properties that
are specified as sets of features.