Jim Hugunin has announced IronPython 1.0. Congratulations to the IronPython team at Microsoft for this release!
From the release announcement:
IronPython is about bringing together two worlds. The key value in IronPython is that it is both a true implementation of Python and is seamlessly integrated with the .NET platform. Most features were easy and natural choices where the language and the platform fit together with almost no work. However, there were challenges from the obvious cases like exception type hierarchies to the somewhat esoteric challenges concerning different methods on strings. We spent long days and sometimes weeks looking for the best answers to these challenging problems and in the end I think that we have stayed true to both Python and .NET.
To drive our Python compatibility, we run a large portion of the standard Python regression test suite in addition to a large custom test suite we added that runs IronPython and CPython side-by-side to test for identical behavior whenever possible. Despite all of this work, there will still be differences between IronPython 1.0 and CPython. The most obvious difference is that IronPython is missing a number of standard C-based extension modules so things like "import bsddb" will fail. We maintain a detailed list of differences between the two implementations and aim to reduce the size of this list in every release.
IronPython has also striven for deep integration with the CLR. For the implementation this is a great thing as it lets us take advantage of highly-tuned components developed for other languages such as the just-in-time compiler, garbage collector, debugging support, reflection, dynamic loading and more. This integration is also valuable to IronPython developers as it lets them easily use any and all libraries built for .NET from their Python code.
Posted on 06 Sep 2006