[via Jeremy Hylton's weblog] Jim Hugunin has been working on IronPython, a new version of Python that will run on .NET. He e-mailed Miguel some preliminary results. This is very good for Python, and should be good news for folks like James Strachan who are working on dynamic languages for VM's. I wonder what the speedups look like on Mono. Can IronPython run Psyco -- can IronPython and Pypy help each other?

Tonight I decided to try to build a Python plugin for XChat that would grab my nick and use the Mac OS X speech engine to say my nick and the channel that I was mentioned in. It sort of boggles me that XChat doesn't have functionality to alert you when you are called on, but so be it. I figured that this was a good chance to do some Python to Mac hacking. The XChat Python plugin should work wonderfully. You can load Python files, execute Python commands, etc. The operative word is should. I tried to do an "import os" and the import failed. Fortunately "import sys" worked, and examining sys.path revealed that XChatAqua is looking for Python 2.2 libraries that were probably built by Fink. Of course, Panther and the latest Fink are both on Python 2.3 and the libaries don't work on 2.2. Next stop, XChatAqua.sf.net to get the sources from CVS. Open the Project Builder file with XCode, and try to build. No joy, as it seems the definition of GSList is missing. So off to Fink to get glib2 (which is hauling down and compiling 11 other packages including OpenSP and Jade).

I even tried Perl -- dropping a perl script into ~/.xchat2, but it doesn't appear to have loaded.