Python Specializing Compiler. See Scripted Compiler for additional context of this page.
David Ascher: The Scripted Compiler ... is not unlike what Armin Rigo talked about at OSCON 2002 - see [...] his home page for Psyco. In his talk, he particularly emphasized that rewriting most of the Python C internals in Python would, when run through the Psyco compiler, actually run faster than the current C implementation. Ideas worth sharing.
AK: Psyco seems to be a mix of generic translation to machine code + specialization of said machine code to concrete values in variables and function parameters.
Peter Odding : Generic translation to machine code + specialization = an optimizing JIT compiler? LuaJIT does this as well. Very nice indeed. Especially because JIT-compilers have a lot of potential for optimization. More so than static compilers actually, IMHO. Not saying they're easy to write though.