[IronPython] Questions for FAQ or User Guide

[Timothy Fitz]

On 4/20/05, Keith J. Farmer <kfarmer at thuban.org> wrote:
> I just came across Starkiller: http://www.python.org/pycon/dc2004/papers/1/paper.pdf

Unfortunately Starkiller will most likely not be released. Michael
Salib was under the employ of MIT when he wrote it and therefor does
not own the code. When I talked to him at PyCon he said he had started
on a rewrite to get around these issues and that releasing it would be
possible but would take convincing MIT the ideas have no commercial
viability (standard operating procedure there, but would take months
minimum and quite a bit of effort).

Also, Starkiller makes assumptions that IronPython absolutely cannot
(no eval and others more egregious).

And now, on the extremely blindingly bright side of things, there is
PyPy. It does type inferencing in a rather different way than
Starkiller, and is designed for targeting different output formats
(CLI!) So the idea is definitely alive and kicking (and now well
funded by the European Union).

As for why I'm so negative about Starkiller's application; blame Brett
Cannon. He gave a good presentation on why type inferencing is very
hard and doesn't gain much in Python without making changes to the
language itself.