Due to its ease of use and wide range of custom libraries, Python has
quickly gained popularity and is used by a wide range of developers
all over the world. While Python allows for fast writing of source
code, the resulting programs are slow to execute when compared
to programs written in other programming languages like C. One
of the reasons for its slow execution time is the dynamic typing
of variables. Cython is an extension to Python, which can achieve
execution speed-ups by compiler optimization. One possibility for
improvements is the use of static typing, which can be added to
Python scripts by developers. To alleviate the need for manual effort,
we create Py2Cy, a Genetic Improvement tool for automatically
converting Python scripts to statically typed Cython scripts. To
show the feasibility of improving runtime with Py2Cy, we optimize
a Python script for generating Fibonacci numbers. The results show
that Py2Cy is able to speed up the execution time by up to a factor
of 18
