At this conference I also managed to miss Robert Love's presetntation. This entry is here to mend the offense, and as a public promise to Robert that there will be some intensive picture taking action at his next presentation.
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!
Robert is famous for doing the most interesting presentations and for two years in a row I have missed his presentation. Yesterday, I was on a meeting while his presentation was running.
The Mono Developer's Handbook from Edd is out! I got my copy from Edd as they sold out the books that Powell had brought to the show. I was told on the elevator from some O'Reilly folks that today they are bringing a bunch more to the show.
Slides from my Mono presentation are here. These slides were done before IronPython was announced.
I have met another five people who were told two nights ago that they had over-sold the hotel, and they could either take 100 dollars or the free room that they would put them on. The hotel claims its standard practice, but I have never met so many people in a conference that were left room-less. Am staying so far, that I can manage to take a nap from my hotel to the conference and ponder all kinds of deep topics on my trip.
In Dallas I ran into Rory in the airport. All I can say on the McDonalds bit is that I was very hungry, and it wont happen again.
Posted on 29 Jul 2004