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Message: [QUOTE="Michael Geary, post: 4433843"] You may be thinking of Pyrex, a Python dialect that compiles to C and lets you mix C and Python data types: [URL]http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg/python/Pyrex/[/URL] Pyrex is really quite nifty, especially for writing C extensions to Python and for wrapping existing C libraries. You can still code in Python or close to it, and let Pyrex write all the boilerplate C code for you. For performance critical algorithms, if you're using C types the generated code should be as fast as any other C code. Psyco, OTOH, works with standard Python code. It's essentially a Just In Time compiler for Python: [URL]http://psyco.sourceforge.net/introduction.html[/URL] Psyco isn't part of the standard Python distribution--you need to install the Psyco module and add this to the top of your source file: import psyco; psyco.full() But that's all there is to it. There's nothing special about the language--it's standard Python. Psyco is only for x86 at the moment, but it can really pep up Python code on the x86. What's fair for performance comparisons? Well, a thorough language benchmark would measure Psyco, standard cPython, and Jython times for x86, plus cPython and Jython for other popular processors. These are all Open Source, so don't let anybody stop you from porting them to Ruby... :-) -Mike [/QUOTE]