Expert Python Programming（Third Edition）

上QQ阅读APP看书，第一时间看更新

IronPython

IronPython brings Python into the .NET Framework. The project is supported by Microsoft, where IronPython's lead developers work. It is quite an important implementation for the promotion of a language. Besides Java, the .NET community is one of the biggest developer communities out there. It is also worth noting that Microsoft provides a set of free development tools that turn Visual Studio into a full-fledged Python IDE. This is distributed as Visual Studio plugins named Python Tools for Visual Studio (PVTS), and is available as open source code on GitHub (http://microsoft.github.io/PTVS).

The latest stable release is 2.7.8, and it is compatible with Python 2.7. Unlike Jython, we can observe active development on both 2.x and 3.x branches of the interpreter, although Python 3 support still hasn't been officially released yet. Despite the fact that .NET runs primarily on Microsoft Windows, it is also possible to run IronPython on macOS and Linux. This is thanks to Mono, a cross platform, open source .NET implementation.

The main differences and advantages of IronPython compared to CPython are as follows:

Similar to Jython, the lack of global interpreter lock (GIL) allows for better utilization of multiple cores in multi-threaded applications
Code written in C# and other .NET languages can be easily integrated in IronPython and vice versa
It can be run in all major web browsers through Silverlight (although Microsoft will stop supporting Silverlight in 2021)

When speaking about weaknesses, IronPython seems very similar to Jython, because it does not support the Python/C Extension APIs. This is important for developers who would like to use packages such as NumPy, which are largely based on C extensions. There were a few community attempts to bring the Python/C Extensions API support to IronPython, or at least to provide compatibility for the NumPy package, but unfortunately no project had notable success in that area.

You can learn more about IronPython from its official project page at http://ironpython.net/.