Attached patch contains zsh/zpython module which embeds python (2.*; at least 2.7.3 and 2.6.8 are known to work) interpreter into zsh. The main idea is to speed things like heavy prompts (this is what it is actually used for: speed up powerline) and highlighting (for example, like here: https://bitbucket.org/ZyX_I/zsh-pygments-highlighting). Note that the latter is just a proof-of-concept, it lacks many features to compete with zsh-syntax-highlighting, though currently showing just the same good performance for command-line of any reasonable length; zsh-syntax-highlighting shows notable delay for >500 characters input.

You can find all code here: https://bitbucket.org/ZyX_I/zsh, branch zpython (git).