IronPython Fully Implements Python 2.7

Posted by Roopesh Shenoy on Apr 05, 2011

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ronPython 2.7 has been released with new features including improved tooling inside Visual Studio, better interoperability with LINQ and extension methods, better documentation, and full language parity with Python 2.7.

The release notes give the following new set of improvements

This release implements the new builtin _io module, includes dictionary and set comprehensions, set literals, supports multiple context managers in the with statement, and adds several new functions to the itertools methods, and auto indexing for the new string formatting. There are also numerous updates to the standard library such as ordered dictionaries and the new argparse module.

and bug fixes

This release includes major performance improvements in cPickle, the sum built-in function, and includes support for fast exceptions which do not use the .NET exception mechanism. There have also been improvements to significantly reduce memory usage of the IronPython ASTs. One of the end results of these numerous improvements is that IronPython’s startup time has decreased by 10% when compared to IronPython 2.6.1.

This release also includes the option to install “IronPython Tools for Visual Studio” within the IronPython installer. This works on top of VS 2010 and now supports XAML and WPF including databinding to Python classes dynamically.

This is the first full community release, and is a major milestone in IronPython development – it proves that there is a vibrant community willing to continue improving the language even without funding from Microsoft. This release all the more exciting since strong integration with Visual Studio was a very popular feature request by Microsoft customers and Jeff Hardy, IronPython MVP and one of the co-ordinators of the IronPython project, himself once said that adding IronPython support to Visual Studio is very hard.

However, there is already some confusion about the default tooling for IronPython, with Microsoft announcing the Python tools for Visual Studio project which is currently in Beta.

IronPython is an implementation of the Python programming language targeting the .Net Framework and Mono. The project was started by Microsoft with the first version shipping in 2006. In 2007, the Dynamic Language Runtime was announced to enable interoperability between Dynamic Languages. After nearly 3 years of development, recently, Microsoft handed over the further development of IronPython to the community.

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   Feature Parity

   by Jeff Hardy

   The article might be a bit misleading - IronPython 2.7 has full *language* parity with 2.7, but we're still missing some modules.

   Reply

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   Re: Feature Parity

   by Roopesh Shenoy

   Thanks Jeff. I will correct this.

   Reply