[IronPython] Lightweight Code Generation?

[J. Merrill]

I agree that it's unfortunate to lose memory at each press of the Enter key, but we are not talking about gobs and gobs of memory, are we?  The usefulness of the interactive mode is so much greater than the few MB of unrecoverable memory that would accumulate during a very long session.  (Even if we can't recover the memory, if it gets paged out and never comes back it should not have a great impact.)  

I for one would trade "you need to exit and start again every 3 hours" for the ability to work in the dynamic, interactive, "hold the data in your hands" mode that (Iron)Python provides.  The fact that we can use a great deal of what .NET has to offer (and eventually will be able to use it all) while writing in Python is great.

The fact the MS seems to have made a poor implementation decision in the 1.x framework -- one that decrees that no code that's been loaded into an AppDomain can be unloaded without destroying the entire AppDomain -- should not prevent us from having a productive environment.  

Taking advantage of -- and perhaps enhancing prior to release -- the new functionality would be great.  However, there are other things that I think are more important to be ready for an eventual 1.0 release of FePy.

Jim is perhaps uniquely positioned to have an impact on the future course of the new capabilities.  Hopefully the issues he mentioned in his other post can be resolved by changes to the CLR -- now that he's on the team.

At 03:19 AM 10/8/2004, Alex Hoffman wrote (in part)
>But I effectively abandoned that ... because I thought that constantly consuming (unrecoverable) memory each time someone hit the enter key was unacceptable. 


J. Merrill / Analytical Software Corp