IronPython for .NET released - and it's faster than Python-2.3

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Some very cool news from Jim Hugunin about IronPython, his port of Python to .NET:

  • He's released it under the CPL
  • It's up to 1.7x faster than Python-2.3 on the pystone benchmark
  • He's joining the Microsoft CLR team to push for more support for dynamic languages!

To quote the IronPython web page: “My plan was to do a little work and then write a short pithy article called "Why .NET is a terrible platform for dynamic languages". My plans changed when I found the CLR to be an excellent target for the highly dynamic Python language.”

(via Miguel de Icaza and Frank Prengel)

Updates:

  • From Edd Dumbill's blog: in Jim's talk he showed that IronPython is 4% slower than Python-2.3 using the more realistic parrotbench benchmark.
  • The slides are now online at oreillynet with more performance figures - IronPython only loses out to Python 2.3 when throwing exceptions. The other good news is that Jim will keep developing it up to v1.0.