Pypy aims to become (probably sometime next year) a strong candidate to replace cpython as the main python implementation. Its goals are very ambicious and one of them is making it fast. Some of its developers even think it can get as fast as C, although I think that if it can get as fast as java, it would be great.
Its other goal is making it flexible and easier to develop and mantain. Note that the project already produced a tool for writing extensions in rpython that are, in theory, as fast a C extensions. So we can say that in some way, the speed goal is already achieved. Luis -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
