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IronPython 1.0 is Born

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the metal-snakes dept.

dougblank writes "IronPython version 1.0 was just released after 3 years of development. Jim Hugunin, the creator of Jython and the lead developer of the Shared Source IronPython, made the birth announcement earlier this week. From the announcement: 'I wanted to understand how Microsoft could have screwed up so badly that the CLR was a worse platform for dynamic languages than the JVM... I found that Python could run extremely well on the CLR — in many cases noticeably faster than the C-based implementation. [...] Shipping IronPython 1.0 isn't the end of the road, but rather the beginning. Not only will we continue to drive IronPython forward but we're also looking at the bigger picture to make all dynamic languages deeply integrated with the .NET platform and with technologies and products built on top of it. I'm excited about how far we've come, but even more excited by what the future holds!'"

4 of 285 comments (clear)

  1. Yes, but.... by gnud · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...does it run on Mono?

    1. Re:Yes, but.... by JimDaGeek · · Score: 5, Interesting
      I actually find the multi-language of of the CLR to be a negative. I work at a fortune 500 and most of us use C# and/or Java. There are a few groups of "programmers" that have always been VB-only/ASP-Only "programmers". They have really no understanding of programming maintainable code. The majority of the junk they churn out is MS-Only/IE-Only crud. The bad part is if one of us programmers ever have to maintain the crappy VB.Net code. C# is a pretty nice language that flows well with .Net and is not overly verbose. VB.Net is the exact opposite, one might as well code in COBOL.Net. It really stinks to have the majority of a code-base in C# and then have some VB.Net assemblies thrown at you that you that you later have to maintain. IMO, it really kills productivity to have to switch to VB.Net from C# for a few bits of a project. To me it seems as if no real design went into VB.Net in contrast to C# which seems like a lot of thought went into how to do things and how not to do things.

      I really wish MS just let VB die with VB 6, it would have been for the best. The VB 6 fans could have continued with VB 6 until they learned a real programming language and real programming techniques.

      I don't see IronPython being adopted by the non-programmers though.
      I agree. I think Python is a good language and most importantly it is cross-platform. Why would someone want to kill Python by making it MS-Only? As far as getting this IronPython on Mono, I don't see it happening. I use Mono and it is pretty nice. Mono has .Net 1.1 complete and .Net 2.0 is pretty much there now too. I just don't see IronPython ever getting enough development behind it to get a port to Mono, especially with a "shared" source license.

      Even though the MS-PR-machine says .Net is cross-platform, it really is not. MS only released a C# compiler for FreeBSD. The compiler is not a big deal. The thing that makes .Net, just like Java, is the extensive framework. MS made an MS-Only framework. It is only because of the hard work of the Mono team that we can enjoy C#/.Net/ASP.Net/ADO.Net/etc on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and even MS Windows. Mono is cross-platform, Microsoft .Net is not. When Sun did Java, they put the effort in to make the most important part, the framework, cross-platform. I wish MS did the same.
      --
      General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
  2. Re:About speed. by grammar+fascist · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My favorite so far is Pyrex, which lets you write C extension modules in a Python-like language. (It adds things like C data types and support for importing header files. I wish it would do generators, though.) A lot of times you can move a hefty inner loop into a Pyrex module and see tremendous gains.

    --
    I got my Linux laptop at System76.
  3. Hrm by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well, the links to the FAQ don't seem to work thanks to some kind of site move (I am asked to download the HTML instead of view it and ... well ... am too lazy tonight). But a few thoughts based on what is already there:

    • It says they are maybe 1.7 times faster than CPython, which is not that great, because CPython is incredibly slow and things like Psyco can give pretty big speedups (say 10 to 100 according to their website).
    • It seems fundamentally impossible to make a language like Python or Ruby fast. By their very nature everything has to be done at the last minute, based on string comparisons, and you can't do global optimizations really because at any moment the program might change itself and invalidate them. Consider the way every object can implement a fallback method that is called if somebody invokes "foo.bar" and bar does not exist in foo. It implies that every single method invocation must be identified by string not a number, and matched by string comparison.
    • If IronPython can't make Python fast .... seems like its only purpose is to give people who like Python and .NET some half way point between the two. But it's not quite Python, because you can't use its standard library, and it's not quite .NET so in a way you seem to get the worst of both worlds

    I guess I just don't get it.