Miguel de Icaza: OSCON

Miguel de Icaza: OSCON "The big announcement yesterday was from Jim Hugunin: IronPython, an implementation of Python for Mono and the .NET Framework was released to the public under the CPL license. It has been a long wait, but it was worth it: Python is a language of choice for many developers because of its ease of use and rapid prototyping cycle, and C# is a fantastic language for component-based and large scale programming, now both languages have come together.
His presentation touched on the challenges of getting a dynamic language like Python to run efficiently on the CLR, and also presented a couple of benchmarks with interesting results: while IronPython on the CLR seemed faster on average with the various tests, with Mono it ranges from 5% to 50% slower (and in a degenerate cases with exceptions, we are 65 times slower). But that being said, it is not terribly slower than Python 2.3, and we are going to look into these issues.
IronPython works out of the box on Linux, and I was able to run Edd's sample out of the box.
Echoing Edd's sentiment: there is a sense of freshness in being able to issue Gtk# commands from the Python command line.
Jim also announced that he is joining the CLR team at Microsoft to improve the VM for scripting languages. Congratulations to Jim on his new job!"