Python running fast on .NET

Jim Hugunin (the creator of Jython) reports that his early .NET compiler for Python is performing very well, in contrast with ActiveState's previous attempt, in some cases better than CPython. It always bothered meb that ActiveState discontinued work, and came to a conclussion on .NET performance rather quickly, with JScript and VB.NET being proofs that better speeds could be achieved.

A copy of Jim's posting is here (the listserv requires a password to read), the details:

The early results with IronPython show that Python compiled to IL can run fast. On the standard pystone benchmark, IronPython-0.1 is 70% faster than CPython-2.3. The numbers for pystone as well as several micro-benchmarks are shown below. For ease of comparison, all times are normalized to Python-2.3. Smaller numbers indicate faster performance.

                IronPython-0.1  Python-2.3      Python-2.1      Jython-2.1
pystone         0.58            1.00            1.29            1.61

function call   0.19            1.00            1.12            1.33
integer add     0.59            1.00            1.18            1.08
string.replace  0.92            1.00            1.00            1.40
range(bigint)   5.57            1.00            1.09            16.02
eval("2+2")     66.97           1.00            1.58            91.33

Good to stop the meme of `.NET is slow for scripting languages'.

Two simple links for the day

Illustration: patent on a simple web app

The simple joys in life

Someone on the net sent me this:

Mono's ASP.NET running on an X-Box running Debian

On the other hand, I do not know how I forgot to blog about a real ASP.NET web site running on Mono: http://www.mo8il.com/