Dag Sverre Seljebotn, 06.08.2010 11:31:
> Mono support could be important *long-term*, because it allows all the
> non-Windows users to not break things on the .NET side when developing
> and merging patches. One can include Mono builds in build farms, whether
> it is Cython, NumPy, SciPy etc.
>
> For that purpose Wine could work as well though if .NET is well
> supported in Wine. Well, given some common scientific Python build farm
> infrastructure (where Sage and Enthought pools together?), even
> VirtualBox would be workable. But at the end of the day, Mono will
> always be more convenient to set up for Linux devs.

Actually, .NET not being portable pretty much rules out any use case I 
might have for it. Mono is the only reason for me to consider IronPython a 
viable alternative to CPython.


> Also, though I don't really know, it might be that Cython+C# would beat
> Cython+CPython performance wise for non-typed Python stuff. And no GIL!

Remember that the GIL makes your life easier. Cython is about writing 
extension modules, and very, very many of those only work *because* of the 
GIL. Here's an example:

http://code.activestate.com/recipes/577336-fast-re-entrant-optimistic-lock-implemented-in-cyt/

In the Cython wrappers I wrote so far, a *lot* of critical code truly 
relies on the GIL.

So, one part of porting Cython to .NET would be to add a global lock for 
the code (at least when threading is used, which may be tricky to 
determine). Obviously, this could become a compiler option for the .NET 
backend, but the lock would still have to be turned off explicitly in order 
to prevent breaking Cython code by default.


> CPython could get its act together with a LLVM backend etc., but it
> would be nice strategically to have Mono available as a competing
> platform, in case CPython doesn't manage to improve matters.

That would be one heck of a dependency, though. I don't know how big LLVM 
is, but I would expect it to be a lot smaller than Mono.

Stefan
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