I’m sitting in Martin Maly’s IronPython talk at EuroOSCON. He’s already mentioned Mono twice, noting that it has passed the IronPython test suite (”… and if it doesn’t right now, Miguel will fix it in a week or so, ha ha”). Not only is IronPython faster than CPython (using pystone), but with the latest .NET releases, IronPython’s performance is improving much faster than CPython’s (from 2.3 to 2.4).
Martin points out that their mailing list receives over 100 emails a month - 30% from Gmail, 3% from Hotmail! Two thirds of their bugs are reported by the community, but they’re not accepting contributions to the core… They’re not quite sure where IronPython is going, so they don’t want to make policy calls about it just yet. Seems like they’re still figuring out this whole community / Open Source thing. 
There’s a project on GotDotNet aiming to port the Python standard library to IronPython, so at least there’s some community projects happening around IronPython.
Cool demo of dynamically creating WinForms windows and widgets from IronPython’s ‘ip’ interactive shell (very familiar). Lots of interesting explanation of how to handle types between the statically typed languages and IronPython, and how to embed IronPython in an existing .NET app. Sweet! You just instantiate a PythonEngine object and diddle with it… Cue demos of extending applications with IronPython scripts, using Word objects from IronPython scripts inside a C# app, a “here’s-one-I-prepared-earlier” broken script to show off debugging of embedded scripts, and the IronPython console within Visual Studio (completion in the editor coming soon).
I wish the few roadblocks to greater adoption and contribution were not there… But it is very cool stuff.
