For a long time, I have been getting C like performance from my Python code by using the JIT (Just In Time) compiler, psyco. I pinged the ChiPy mailing list about the possibility of running psyco on a Mac now they are switching to Intel--psyco only runs on Intel. The general census is that psyco will run without modification.

Because, the Intel machine code is common and psyco compiles the Python sources at run-time into several variations of machine code, I suspect a lot of advantages in the Mac Python execution time in the Mac world now. This is good because I have already cut much of my development time on using the high-level language Python without much penalty in performance.

Most my code already has tries to import psyco with a try block:

try:
    import psyco
    psyco.full()
except ImportError:
    pass

The idea here is if it fails, the code will still work.

Not everybody is happy with the move away from IBM. However, this may be one advantage.