[IronPython] Questions for Jim....

[Brian Lloyd]

Hi all - 

Most of these questions are for Jim, but I think the answers 
would probably be helpful to others, so I thought I'd post 
them to the list...

Contribution: I'd really like to contribute to get IP to a 
production-ready release. Contributing builtin-module 
implementations would be right up my alley given my, er, 
copious free time ;) There isn't a public repository at the 
moment, so what is the best way to do that? Email things to 
Jim?

Related to that, the current 0.6 code is released under CPL 1.0. 
Should contributions be sent under the same license? That seems 
obvious, but worth verifying since I don't know that MS' stance 
regarding IP and contributions to it has been described explicitly.

Two others related to libraries (built-in or otherwise). 

"Batteries included" is a catchphrase for CPython, referring to the 
included library of standard modules. While I can divine how to implement 
a 'built-in' module in C# based on the 0.6 code, it looks like we still 
need a way to replicate one of the befefits of the CPython libraries 
(specifically that you can implement a library in Python, at least as a 
prototype, then move it to 'native' code later w/o changing the Python 
interface). That is also probably a key to 'keeping up with the latest 
Python version' for the CLR implementation, since most new library 
module are implemented in Python first. I don't see a way to do that 
currently (but maybe I'm missing something?)

Finally, Python is an ideal language for writing unit tests. While a 
reasonably large part of the Python community is 'test-infected', there 
are currently no unit tests for most of the built-in and standard 
libaries in Python. Implementing new built-in and standard libs for 
IP could be an opportunity to create those unit tests and contribute 
them back to the Python community at large to be used in the CPython 
implementation as well. I would argue that getting unittest.py 
(or a managed equivalent) working in the near term should be a 
reasonably high priority (and would also provide the infrastructure 
to better gauge the state of the managed Python runtime as a whole).

Sorry for the litany of questions, but I wanted to get them all 
out while I was thinking about it ;)


Brian Lloyd        brian at zope.com
V.P. Engineering   540.361.1716              
Zope Corporation   http://www.zope.com