I am not quite sure how this helps over Pyrex though. Both Pyrex and ShedSkin translate to low-level, native compilable code. I thought of Pyrex as something streamlined for extensions and ShedSkin as streamlined for stand-alone executables. While you can include C code if you want in Pyrex, that is optional. And now that Pyrex supports C++ as well, the differences are blurring.
In Pyrex (my understanding at least) - if you use Python syntax it creates Python types (in C). This means you see very little speed increase for arbitrary Python code.
The advantage of Pyrex comes when you mix C and Python types. So Pyrex is very good for itnerfacing C and Python. My understanding may be off here.
ShedSKin would convert your Python code into the equivalent optimised C++. (So long as it is compatible with the static code constructs that it can use - otherwise it won't work at all.) So for correctly written code you should be able to get a huge speed advantage without having to write any C/C++ at all.
the goal of shedskin is to convert _pure_ but static python code, without any form of type declarations into optimized C++. it is not yet possible to create extension modules or use modules such as 're' from compiled code, but this is only a matter of time (and help ^^)
Commenting by HaloScan
