Is it feasible to compile Python to machine code?

Question

How feasible would it be to compile Python (possibly via an intermediate C representation) into machine code?

Presumably it would need to link to a Python runtime library, and any parts of the Python standard library which were Python themselves would need to be compiled (and linked in) too.

Also, you would need to bundle the Python interpreter if you wanted to do dynamic evaluation of expressions, but perhaps a subset of Python that didn't allow this would still be useful.

Would it provide any speed and/or memory usage advantages? Presumably the startup time of the Python interpreter would be eliminated (although shared libraries would still need loading at startup).

Answer 1

Jython has a compiler targeting JVM bytecode. The bytecode is fully dynamic, just like the Python language itself! Very cool. (Yes, as Greg Hewgill's answer alludes, the bytecode does use the Jython runtime, and so the Jython jar file must be distributed with your app.)