Really good news for the enthusiasts of dynamic languages and Python. Sun just hired Ted Leung and Jython leader Frank Wierzbicki to work full time on bringing Jython closer to CPython 2.5 (currently Jython is compatible with Python 2.2).
For Jython and the Python community this are pretty exciting news for several reasons:
Bringing together the easy of use of the Python web frameworks such as Django with the scalability facilities that Java has would be a huge step.
Python (and Django? Zope? TurboGears?) integration in NetBeans.
Develop real parallel applications. The global interpreter lock prevents the CPython implementation to have more than one worker running at the same time. With the JVM the problem just goes away.
There are also a lot of areas where Jython has better performance results than CPython has.
And lots of other cool things. The only drawbacks is that even if it gets to be Python 2.5 compliant, bindngs such as PyGTK won't work though.
All in all, more choice for the Python lovers!
Ted, Frank, welcome aboard!
Yes, the bindings issue, and Gtk in particular, is a concern. Would automated bindings using gobject-introspection and pybank solve this, I wonder?
If not, I guess we'll all have to work to get the Java bindings perfected. But at least then that effort will help any language running on the Java VM.
Posted by: kripken | 03/04/2008 at 02:44 PM
Neat. With IronPython growing up as well, it seems like we might soon seeing those job openings for python hacking growing more and more.
Posted by: shayne | 03/04/2008 at 03:01 PM
I don't see why ctypes could not be implemented, ironpython are on there way to implement it.
http://lists.ironpython.com/pipermail/users-ironpython.com/2006-June/002500.html
And pygtk could be moved to it. The it would work for pypy also.
Posted by: Olafur Arasn | 03/04/2008 at 06:23 PM