March 31, 2006

IronPython 1.0 Beta 5 Released

IronPython: News item

via a recent post to the IronPython's Community Interface, Dino Viehland writs:

We have just released IronPython 1.0 Beta 5. This release focuses primarily on improving IronPython’s performance. In this area we’ve reduced working set and startup type by optimizing methods on-demand, improved the speed of attribute access, reduced the overhead in many basic operations (e.g. equality checks and uninitialized checks for local variables), and done other various fine tuning. As usual there are also a good number of bug fixes (primarily focused on community reported bugs). There was also one significant API change in the .NET <-> Python interoperability area:

If we have the following definitions:

public class Foo {
public void Bar(int arg) {}
public void Bar(int arg) {}
}

We can call the non-generic version with any of:
foo.Bar(1)
foo.Bar.__overloads__[int](1)

And the generic one with any of:
foo.Bar[str](1)
foo.Bar.__overloads__[int][str](1)
foo.Bar[str].__overloads__[int](1)

This is different from previous versions of IronPython where indexing was used to provide access to generic methods.

A more complete list of changes follows at the end.

You can download the release from: MS Download Center

We'd like to thank everyone in the community for your bug reports and suggestions that helped make this a better release: Aaronm, Anthony Tarlano, Eugene Rosenzweig, Shigeru Hemmi, JoeSox, John Platt, Klaus M�ller, Lewis Franklin, Pete Sheill, Rusty Deschenes, and Sanghyeon Seo.

Thanks and keep in touch,
The IronPython Team

More complete list of changes and bug fixes:
============================================
ReflectOptimize methods on-demand
ReflectOptimize hasattr/getattr/setattr and other context aware methods
Improve BigInteger parsing performance
abs(True) and abs(False) fixed to match CPython behavior
os(‘stat’) sets file modes properly now
Bugfix: Setting variables in nt.environ doesn’t propagate to environment
Bugfix: Improve constructing files from streams
ReflectOptimizer inlines type checks for non-convertible types (ICallerContext & UserType)
Optimize uses of Ops.IsTrue(Ops.Equal(… )) to Ops.EqualRetBool to avoid boxing & conversions
Support binding to generic .NET methods and move manual overload resolution __overloads__ dictionary
Use data flow analysis to avoid Uninitialized checks where possible in locals
Optimize generator.next calls to get good performance
Bugfix: IronPython CodeDom cannot round trip 2 buttons on a form
Improve performance of constructing commonly used built-in types
FunctionEnvironment performance improvements
Minor tweaks to casting orders
Avoid TLS where possible in repr
Bugfix: from __future__ import division doesn’t flow into eval in some cases
Bugfix: hasattr raises
Bugfix: need to implement nt.startfile
Bugfix: subclassing Tuple not working
Bugfix: fix resource definitions in generated files
Large namespaces use binary search to find attributes
Bugfix: -i option doesn’t go interactive when exception is raised
SuperConsole now supports Ctrl_C handling as well as basic console
Bugfix: ‘%02d’ % 12 appends a leading zero
Attribute access re-written for significant performance gains
Bugfix: nt module doesn’t implement chdir
ReflectedPackage’s delay load all type loads
Bugfix: atxexit doesn’t work
Bugfix: IP: Cannot use a class from IronPython generated class libraries
Bugfix: Cannot delete variable referenced in nested scope
Bugfix: Support special method names (__int__, __pos__, etc…)
Bugfix: Support for generic & non-generic types of the same name in same namespace
Bugfix: __doc__ strings should reflect how we mangle calling conventions
Bugfix: Update makefiles to include new assembly references