[IronPython] The slow part of IronPython

[Dan Eloff]

> There's a couple of plans a foot.  We have been working on a pre-compilation feature like .pyc for IronPython 2.0  It's actually in Beta 3 but unfortunately it doesn't quite work yet which is the reason we haven't said anything.  It will be there (and working!) in beta 4.

Wow, looking forward to that!

>that's the short term solution but unfortunately it won't really work with Silverlight - there's no way to compile against the Silverlight mscorlib from the desktop CLR and Silverlight doesn't support saving assemblies to disk.

That seems more like a Silverlight problem than an IronPython one.
However, I can in Silverlight save arbitrary data to IsolatedStorage
(client side). This would, I think, enable caching the compiled
modules and loading them again on a per user basis, if only I have the
right api in IronPython to get the compiled module as byte
array/string and load from the same. I could then tweak the importing
machinery (import hook? it can be done in CPython) slightly to check
IsolatedStorage first for the compiled module and load that if
possible, falling back to the standard importing mechanism, with the
minor difference of saving the compiled module to IsolatedStorage.
i.e. build in the .pyc saving/loading in python using IsolatedStorage
instead of the file system.

Any chance you guys could provide that api? Because it would be a
dream to see IronPython totally scream in the browser.

-Dan