IronPython 2.7 Now Available

[Jeff Hardy]

On behalf of the IronPython team, I'm very pleased to announce the
release of IronPython 2.7. This release contains all of the language
features of Python 2.7, as well as several previously missing modules
and numerous bug fixes. IronPython 2.7 also includes built-in Visual
Studio support through IronPython Tools for Visual Studio. IronPython
2.7 requires .NET 4.0 or Silverlight 4.

To download IronPython 2.7, visit
http://ironpython.codeplex.com/releases/view/54498. Any bugs should be
reported at http://ironpython.codeplex.com/workitem/list/basic.

Python 2.7 includes a number of features backported from the Python
3.0 series. This release implements the new builtin _io module,
includes dictionary and set comprehensions, set literals, supports
multiple context managers in the with statement, and adds several new
functions to the itertools methods, and auto indexing for the new
string formatting. There are also numerous updates to the standard
library such as ordered dictionaries and the new argparse module.

This release also includes a “IronPython Tools for Visual Studio”
option within the IronPython installer. This enables one install to
get both IronPython and IronPython Visual Studio support assuming you
have an existing installation of Visual Studio 2010. This version of
IronPython Tools includes a number of bug fixes as improved WPF
designer support. The designer fully supports XAML and WPF including
data binding to Python classes dynamically.

To improve interop with modern .NET code such as LINQ, support for
extension methods has been added as the clr.ImportExtensions method.

We’ve also updated the IronPython installer to include documentation
based upon the CPython documentation. This new .chm file includes
documentation on the Python language and standard library. It’s been
extended from the normal Python documentation to include IronPython
specific topics such as the DLR hosting APIs and extending IronPython
from statically typed .NET languages.

We flushed out more support for missing built-in modules which CPython
includes. This release includes the mmap and signal modules bringing
better support for interoperating with unmanaged code, the zlib and
gzip modules for compression, and the subprocess and webbrowser
modules for interacting with other programs.

As usual there are a number of bug fixes and performance improvements.
This release includes major performance improvements in cPickle, the
sum built-in function, and includes support for fast exceptions which
do not use the .NET exception mechanism. There have also been
improvements to significantly reduce memory usage of the IronPython
ASTs. One of the end results of these numerous improvements is that
IronPython’s startup time has decreased by 10% when compared to
IronPython 2.6.1.

This is the first full community release of IronPython, and I want to
give a huge thank you to everyone who was involved in this release.

- Jeff