-I don’t see me adding support for descriptors and other similar features any time soon. Shed Skin is really about ‘writing C++ with Python syntax’. Type inference and code generation would become too complicated otherwise. Sure you won’t be able to do anything you want, but it does keep shed skin small and effective for cases where you can apply it, ‘like a knife’.

-I’ll be looking into packaging issues for the next version.

-The largest program compiled so far is about 1,600 lines (including comments.) The ss-progs.tgz file on the homepage contains several other working programs of over 500 lines. How well things scale depends on how difficult it is to analyze a program. This usually translates to how much you overload builtin containers with different types of elements. If you use 20 lists each with different types of elements, it takes a while for the analysis to unravel the different ‘list contexts’. If you use several custom classes to hold stuff, analysis will typically proceed much faster. In the future, improvements in type inference (I spent most time on other details so far), and feeding shed skin with profiling information should allow it to easily scale beyond 1,500 lines in most cases.

Btw, I also managed to compile a pygame application before. It’s a bit larger, and I used the Python C/API to talk directly to Pygame, which seems a bit more cumbersome. See this blog entry:
http://shed-skin.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html. This program is one of the test cases contained in ss-progs.tgz from the homepage.