The functional project has seen a lot of work since its inception (which predates its announcement). Version 0.1 was released on 19 January, and now less than two weeks later, version 0.5 is making its way to PyPI.

This latest release sees the project split into two branches. One is written, as before, in pure Python, targeting readability and portability. The second is coded in C, aiming for raw performance. Both support the same functionality and pass the same test suite.

Speaking of functionality…I was digging around the itertools module the other day and what should I discover but pre-existing implementations of most of functional’s members. All the duplicates have been stripped out for the 0.5 release. I’m hoping to add more useful higher-order tools to replace them.