Here are some data points that illustrate the improvement in speed since 2.1 for one (probably atypical) application: rummaging through a 120MB Microsoft Excel spreadsheet file using the xlrd package.
The time shown is the number of seconds required to open the file and parse out all data content -- heavy usage of struct.unpack(). The only code that is conditional on the Python version is where it defines things to stop 2.1 barfing, like a dummy class called "object" . 2.1.3: 117 2.2.3: 95 2.3.5: 75 2.4.3: 62 2.5c1: 49 Other info: xlrd version: 0.6.0a2 -- coming soon to a cheese shop near you :-) OS: Windows XP SP2 CPU: PROCESSOR_IDENTIFIER=x86 Family 15 Model 4 Stepping 1, GenuineIntel HumanSpeak: Intel dual-core Pentium (R) 4, nominal speed is 3.20Ghz Memory: 1 Gb (enough to avoid swapping) Well done, core devs! FWIW, IronPython 1.0.60816 does it in 132 seconds. For avoidance of doubt (and flak!) I'd like to clarify that IMHO the mere existence of IronPython merits plaudits. I do however trust that it will similarly become faster over time. And nobody mentioned the possibility of an 188% increase in memory usage, which may well be partially explained by this: DOS prompt>\ironpython\ipy IronPython 1.0.60816 on .NET 2.0.50727.42 Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. >>> str is unicode True Cheers, John -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list