[IronPython] Importing in a background thread

[Dan Eloff]

I'm curious why importing in a background thread fails completely in
Silverlight (well anything builtin and anything already loaded works).
There seems to be many ways of hacking together a crude working import
function using exec, imp, or the hosting api. This would lead me to
believe that there's nothing blocking import from working in threads
on Silverlight.

I've been hacking all day with Kamil's parallel importer, and using
some crude hacks, I've managed to get quite far with it. Most every
obstacle being an incompatibility between my import function and
Python import semantics (which are not simple, especially with regard
to nested packages!) So I've given up for now, but I'd like to be able
to revisit this later if __import__ works. There seems to be no other
optimization I can do that would give as much speedup to load time.

-Dan