Psyco is unmaintained, the developer of it (Armin Rigo) is working on PyPy (a Python compiler written in Python) instead: http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/
They are already seeing quite nice results for computation-heavy benchmarks with the (tracing) JIT: http://speed.pypy.org/comparison/
While psyco is great you can't really rely on it anymore since it's 32-bit only. Though simply using it if it's available does help slower, older machines that need the speedup, so I wouldn't write it off completely.
Hopefully Unladen Swallow will make even more progress over the rest of the year.
Comments
Should also just check out Psyco: http://psyco.sourceforge.net/
"Psyco is a Python extension module which can greatly speed up the execution of any Python code."
Psyco is unmaintained, the developer of it (Armin Rigo) is working on PyPy (a Python compiler written in Python) instead: http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/
They are already seeing quite nice results for computation-heavy benchmarks with the (tracing) JIT: http://speed.pypy.org/comparison/
While psyco is great you can't really rely on it anymore since it's 32-bit only. Though simply using it if it's available does help slower, older machines that need the speedup, so I wouldn't write it off completely.
Hopefully Unladen Swallow will make even more progress over the rest of the year.