One of the things that people would really like to have on IronPython is support for pre-compiled Python (.pyc) files. These files are pre-parsed and converted into the bytecode format that the Python interpreter actually runs. This speeds execution up for a couple of reasons: - The application does not need to parse the source code prior to execution - The operations are usually at least minimally optimized already by the parsing engine
I was intrigued by the Python bytecode, it looked like a fun little thing to play around with, so I developed very minimal and early support for bytecode interpretation in the IronPython codebase. You can see my commits at my fork of the IronPython repository on Github. There is still a LOT of work that needs to be done, but there are a lot smarter people out there who once the basic framework is in place can take it and run with it.
The commits above also add support for the ever important __hello__ and __phello__ imports. One more thing making IronPython more compatible with CPython.