How feasible would it be to compile Python (possibly via an intermediate C representation) into machine code?
Presumably it would need to link to a Python runtime library, and any parts of the Python standard library which were Python themselves would need to be compiled (and linked in) too.
Also, you would need to bundle the Python interpreter if you wanted to do dynamic evaluation of expressions, but perhaps a subset of Python that didn’t allow this would still be useful.
Would it provide any speed and/or memory usage advantages? Presumably the startup time of the Python interpreter would be eliminated (although shared libraries would still need loading at startup).
Try ShedSkin Python-to-C++ compiler, but it is far from perfect. Also there is Psyco – Python JIT if only speedup is needed. But IMHO this is not worth the effort. For speed-critical parts of code best solution would be to write them as C/C++ extensions.