Keynote: IronPython

The keynote this morning was by Jim Hugunin recently of Microsoft. The topic was IronPython. Jim took us for a spin around the now BSD-style implementation of Python running on top of the .NET CLR.

Jim started out trying to prove that the CLR was a horrible platform for dynamic languages, but after running some tests realized that quite the opposite was true. When the proof of concept was presented last year, IronPython was about 70% faster than CPython. With advances in the .NET CLR and the fact that IronPython targets version 2.0 of the platform, IronPython is now just about 80% faster than CPython.

Speed doesn’t come without a cost though. IronPython is quite a memory hog compared to CPython. Jim thinks that it’s not a big deal though. Jim demoed a few very interesting things about the platform. In the first demo, he drove Peety the parrot from the interactive Python interpreter. That was neat. The real amazement was when he called a C# extension from the interpreter that in turn called Python code. I’m sure that Jim was releived when it didn’t crash. The ability to extend IronPython is pretty big. Using C# extension are as simple as loading the assembly and importing the namespace.

IronPython’s ability to leverage Avalon widgets and bling isn’t that cool. Pretty yes, cool no. However, the ability to import XAML and then walk the tree and interact with it is extremly cool.

Jim was asked about IronPython and if it might eventually run on Mono and Rotor. He says “not right now” but by the time they’re done implementing .NET 2.0 in Rotor, it should work just fine. It sounds like there is also some interest in the Mono camp about getting IronPython to run on the platform.

All in all it was a thought provoking presentation. I didn’t realize how polished the implementation had become in such a short time. Microsoft now as 1.5 people working on the project, although it constantly benefits from speed boosts and optimization done by the CLR team.

Go ahead and Grab IronPython 0.7. It is released under a BSD-style license, although toward the end of the talk there were some questions raised about patents pertaining to IronPython that might make your life… interesting. Read the FAQ for more.