anu(e)scape

Jim Hugunin, of AspectJ and JPython/Jython, has made a preliminary version of Python that runs pretty fast on .NET.

Here's an excerpt from his .NET Language Devs mailing list post:

The early results with IronPython show that Python compiled to IL can run fast. On the standard pystone benchmark, IronPython-0.1 is 70% faster than CPython-2.3. The numbers for pystone as well as several micro-benchmarks are shown below. For ease of comparison, all times are normalized to Python-2.3. Smaller numbers indicate faster performance.

           IronPython-0.1 Python-2.3 Python-2.1 Jython-2.1
pystone         0.58      1.00       1.29       1.61

function call   0.19      1.00       1.12       1.33
integer add     0.59      1.00       1.18       1.08
string.replace  0.92      1.00       1.00       1.40
range(bigint)   5.57      1.00       1.09       16.02
eval("2+2")     66.97     1.00       1.58       91.33

Via Thinking In .Net.