Microsoft is ready for community feedback on its implementation
of the Ruby language.
At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore., Microsoft
on July 23 announced that it will deliver via RubyForge a core set
of features of IronRuby, the company's implementation of the Ruby
language, to solicit community feedback. RubyForge is a
collaborative software development management system dedicated to
projects related to the Ruby programming language.
John Lam, creator of RubyCLR and a member of Microsoft's DLR
(Dynamic Runtime Language) team, said in a blog post July 23 that
the team had been working over the past couple of months to get the
first source code release of IronRuby ready.
"I'm happy to announce today the first drop of the IronRuby source
code," Lam said. "IronRuby is licensed under very liberal terms as
set out by the Microsoft Permissive License. We're also happy to
announce that we will be accepting source code contributions into
the IronRuby libraries. Right now we have a lot of logistical work
that we still need to do, but we fully intend on getting IronRuby
onto RubyForge by the end of August."
IronRuby is implemented on top of the DLR, a set of services that
run on top of the CLR (Common Language Runtime) 2.0 and are used to
execute dynamic languages on the .Net Framework. IronRuby will be
fully integrated with the .Net Framework and will be able to run
crossplatform through Silverlight 1.1 as well as run on Windows
desktop and server platforms through all versions of the .Net
Framework.
Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., first introduced IronRuby and
the DLR at its MIX conference in Las Vegas in April 2007, when it
announced that the DLR and IronPython would be released on the
Microsoft CodePlex community development site under the Microsoft
Permissive License. Microsoft officials said the IronRuby
announcement shows Microsoft's ongoing commitment to providing a
variety of innovative technologies that meet the needs of customers
and the developer community at large.
Meanwhile, Lam said Microsoft is only accepting contributions to
the IronRuby libraries and not the entire compiler, "because
IronRuby is built on top of the Dynamic Language Runtime, and the
public interfaces to the DLR are not complete at this time. Since
the DLR will ship as part of the CLR in the future, we cannot
accept contributions into the IronRuby compiler, at least
initially. However, once the DLR matures and reaches 1.0 status
with fully supported public interfaces, we will fully open up all
parts of the IronRuby project for external contributions."
Lam said his team has seen "pretty good performance" in the latest
release of IronRuby. "We use a DLR feature called Dynamic Sites,
which is our implementation of adaptive call-site method caching,"
he said.