Lambda the Ultimate

The second release of Unladen Swallow was made available yesterday. The project plan describes the goals as follows:

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.

Of course, Google is known for writing a lot of their software in Python, and now they are trying to speed it up, just like the V8 project has done for JavaScript.