AmFast Released!

I released the alpha version of AmFast today. AmFast is an AMF3 encoder/decoder Python extension.

Some un-sophisticated testing shows that AmFast is around ~18x quicker than PyAmf. 10,000 runs through the test_complex_encode_decode_dict() unit test takes ~105 seconds on my machine using PyAmf, and ~5.8 seconds using AmFast.

If you want to try it out, you can download the package from PyPi, and take a look at the meager documentation.

AmFast supports all of the data types that PyAmf does, but there is not yet any functionality for implementing remoting, or working with AMF0. I'm hoping that AmFast will be able to integrate into PyAmf, so that you can optionally use either the existing pure Python AMF3 encoder/decoder, or AmFast within the PyAmf framework.

This was my first time working with the Python C API, and I think it's pretty cool. Besides having to remember to increment and decrement Python object reference counts in the right spots, it was pretty easy to learn. I'm not anywhere near a C expert, and I wrote this extension in my spare time over the course of a couple of weeks.