What does HackerNews think of codon?
A high-performance, zero-overhead, extensible Python compiler using LLVM
> What is Codon?
> Codon is a high-performance Python compiler that compiles Python code to native machine code without any runtime overhead. Typical speedups over Python are on the order of 10-100x or more, on a single thread. Codon's performance is typically on par with (and sometimes better than) that of C/C++. Unlike Python, Codon supports native multithreading, which can lead to speedups many times higher still. Codon grew out of the Seq project.
> What isn't Codon?
> While Codon supports nearly all of Python's syntax, it is not a drop-in replacement, and large codebases might require modifications to be run through the Codon compiler. For example, some of Python's modules are not yet implemented within Codon, and a few of Python's dynamic features are disallowed. The Codon compiler produces detailed error messages to help identify and resolve any incompatibilities.
> Codon can be used within larger Python codebases via the @codon.jit decorator. Plain Python functions and libraries can also be called from within Codon via Python interoperability.
The reason why it doesn't quite work out is that typically such a thing, AOT-compiled into native code, still carries with it its limitations and assumptions. It's technically native, but experiencing the native APIs only through a narrow peephole in the fence.
If we let this meaning of "native" take over, we're gonna need another word for actually native things.
Sometimes, that works well enough, though!
Just as a piece of evidence, there are interpreted C++ (http://www.artificialworlds.net/wiki/IGCC/IGCC) and AOT Python (https://github.com/exaloop/codon) implementations.