Right now Nuitka is a good replacement for the Python interpreter and compiles every construct that CPython 2.6, 2.7, 3.2 and 3.3 offer. It translates the Python into a C++ program that then uses "libpython" to execute in the same way as CPython does, in a very compatible way. It is somewhat faster than CPython already, but currently it doesn't make all the optimizations possible, but a 258% factor on pystone is a good start (number is from version 0.3.11).