Jim Hugunin has joined the CLR team at Microsoft, and also just released version 0.6 of IronPython, an open source CLR implementation of the Python language.
He has written an interesting paper which focuses on the performance of Python on a VM.
Unfortunately, as I carried out my experiments I found the CLR to be a surprisingly good target for dynamic languages, or at least for the highly dynamic specific case of Python. This was unfortunate because it meant that instead of writing a short pithy paper I had to build a full Python implementation for this new platform to see if there would be any hidden traps along the way. Because performance is such a dominant question for Python on the CLR, the rest of this paper focuses entirely on performance issues and measurements.
The CLR version runs some benchmarks as fast or faster than the native C implementation of Python.
Microsoft keeps hiring bright guys. Why aren’t we hearing that Sun is hiring these folk? Jim was the guy who brought us Jython, so he was playing in our backyard first!
