This reminds me that most of what PyPy delivers today - 10x speedup, full range of the Python language, was available within CPython in a module called Psyco th

This reminds me that most of what PyPy delivers today - 10x speedup, full range of the Python language, was available within CPython in a module called Psyco that you could easily install. Like PyPy for a long time, Psyco was only available on x86. Psyco's author, Armin Rigo, then got disgusted with Psyco and went on to work on PyPy (possibly for more sanity and better funding). So, yes, I'd be quite happy to use PyPy, even by default, if it was as easy to install as CPython (or ghc, for that matter, which is a bit larger than CPython but also quite easy to install) and worked out of the box. I definitely was when it came to Psyco.