The sluggish nature of the interpreter, especially the long startup time,
is the main thing that's keeping me from doing most of my serious application
programming in Python. I'd drop C++ like a hot potato if I could compile
my Python programs.
What are the obstacles to writing a Python compiler? As far as I can tell,
the big one is the "eval" statement, which basically forces you to include
a copy of the compiler in every executable. Disallow "eval", or limit its
use to parsing ASCII-format data structures (which I imagine is its most
frequent function anyway) and it doesn't seem like writing a compiler would
be all that hard.
Not that I'm volunteering, mind you.
-Steve (who remembers very little from his college compiler course)