ZipPy status update

[Wei Zhang]

Hi all,

I want to give you a short update about the status of ZipPy, the
Python truffle implementation we've working on at UC Irvine.

I attached the performance charts that compare ZipPy to the other
major Python 2 or 3 implementations like CPython and PyPy.
The best speedup over CPython3.3 so far is over 100x on fannkuchredux.
Please refer to the link below for more numbers:
http://goo.gl/NeuIrf

In general, we are getting fairly close to PyPy with a few benchmarks
running even faster.

Built-in function specialization and inlining give a substantial boost
on performance. Thanks to Gulfem Savrun Yeniceri for rewriting all the
built-ins.

In terms of optimizations, ZipPy currently uses shape based object
model, unboxed collection type storage for list and array. I
implemented inline caching for attribute accesses in Python, but
still having compilation problems. This is the reason why I didn't
include more object intensive benchmarks like richards.
We also plan to apply some specific optimizations for Python generators.

Hope you all have a great holiday!
Thanks,

/Wei