PsycoCheetah

Concept

Cheetah is a great templating system, but if you look at the code it produces, it's not very efficient. You could make a compiler for an enhanced cheetah templating language (why not clean up the language while we're at it?) which compiles the templates into x86 assembler, similar to the way psyco optimizes python programs (except without psyco's aggressive optimizations that use up tons of memory and benefit complex algorithms, but which you wouldn't need for something as simple as a template).

This would, of course, make rendering a template insanely fast, which you'd need for really high volume websites. Combined with something like memcached for the database layer, this thing would fly!

The reason I'd want to do something like this is to make python the most productive AND highest-performance web-development platform out there, which would attract people programming very large projects whose improvements would get worked back into the python ecosystem.