Can Codon 'Turbocharge Python's Notoriously Slow Compiler'?

IEEE Spectrum reports on Codon, a Python compiler specifically developed to, as they put it, "turbocharge Python's Notoriously slow compiler."
"We do type checking during the compilation process, which lets us avoid all of that expensive type manipulation at runtime," says Ariya Shajii, an MIT CSAIL graduate student and lead author on a recent paper about Codon.
Without any unnecessary data or type checking during runtime, Codon results in zero overhead, according to Shajii. And when it comes to