Mono, Boo, Python, Gnome & IronPython

By Michael Foord -
Miguel de Icaza has a blog entry responding to an article on 'Mono Usage in the Enterprise':
It has some interesting comments on the role of Python in the Gnome project and IronPython and Boo on Mono:

Python is indeed making great strides as a desktop development platform and am not sure that we are in the business of competing with it. If people like writing Python code, they should just keep writing python code.

Myself, I like the IronPython variation of Python more. IronPython just happens to be JITed Python and in most tests it is faster than CPython. For the past year or so, we have also been in love with Boo, another .NET language. Boo has support for strong typing, so for certain scenarios you will get even better performing code (basically, when you can determine the type of a variable ahead of time, instead of having the variable be entierly late bound).

Comments

  1. Bill Mill12/07/2007 2:56 pm

    > in most tests it is faster than CPython.

    What?? in every test I've seen, it's about twice as slow. Where are these tests?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Michael Foord12/07/2007 4:08 pm

    IronPython runs Pystopne quite a bit faster than CPython. For pybench it runs some bits a lot faster, some bits a lot slower and most about the same.

    I'm not aware of any other benchmarks but there may well be some around. In my experience it feels about the same for most things. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Luis12/07/2007 4:19 pm

    In my experience, ironpython is still a lot slower than cpython, at least 2x. And comparing it to cpython + psyco, it simply can't compete.
    Unfortunately there are no benchmarks available (only for ironpython/Mono).

    ReplyDelete
  4. Michael Foord12/07/2007 6:08 pm

    Hmmm... well I've been developing almost exclusively with IronPython for nearly two years now. Whilst in some areas it is slower, in others (particularly functional calls and non-exceptional exception handling) it is much faster.

    Overall it definitely feels similar and certainly not half the speed. Of course for a different application or using particular libraries there may be issues.

    ReplyDelete
  5. james_02712/08/2007 2:36 am

    @fuzzyman

    it's nice to heard from you that you're developing with IronPython for nearly two years now, what are you application? WFP? winforms? or ASP.NET?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Michael Foord12/08/2007 11:35 am

    A spreadsheet application written in IronPython called Resolver. The next blog entry here will be about our free public beta... :-)

    ReplyDelete
  7. Markus6/02/2008 9:43 am

    Boo is at least 3x faster than IronPython..

    Its the fastest python(-like) language out there.

    I hope the IronPython and Boo Guys will bundle their powers and produce THE compiled / .NET language for the next decades

    ReplyDelete
  8. Michael Foord6/02/2008 10:41 am

    The IronPython guys are working on a dynamic language on top of the Dynamic Language Runtime and are not going to morph IronPython into a statically compiled language.

    ReplyDelete

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