I would certainly like to. The base implementation of Cannoli is the best place to continue this. Some optimizations that were implemented apply restrictions to parts of the language and following these any further would ultimately diverge from the Python project. That being said, many of the optimizations could still be done and "fall back" on unoptimized code at run time if needed. I think this project certainly shows a lot of promise, it just hasn't been developed as long as other projects so it still needs plenty of work :).