rubydoes.net

I’ve seen a number of rumblings about IronRuby not being able to do this, or that it’s too early to release because it doesn’t do that, and wanted to play devils advocate. Would I love to see a fully functional IronRuby right now, of course. Am I happy we got to see what we have thus far? Very..

Although the bits are early, what was released provides great insight into how a dynamic language is implemented on top of the DLR. Although much of the ruby language is not implemented, many of the core ideas such as dynamic compilation, dynamic malleable types, and AST (Abstract Source Tree) building are working, and well worth taking a look at. The better the community gets to know these parts of IronRuby the faster they will be able to help port libraries, and even provide patches to IronRuby’s internals.

This is a major ideology shift for Microsoft. I don’t remember ever seeing something so raw from Microsoft, and this is one of the first, if not the first time Microsoft has really attempted to release a true open source product. There is of course debate everywhere about this point, but in the end the license is at OSI for review, raw early releases are in the wild, and hosting will be on an open source friendly host. Whether this pans out or not is still up in the air, but all early indications point to this being a very viable true open source project coming out of Microsoft. In that context, early bits are ALWAYS welcome for people to review, and in fact the earlier the better.

Lastly, building momentum. For a week there has been at least a moderate buzz about IronRuby, and that is important for any project. Negative or positive press, people are thinking and talking about this, which makes it real. If nothing else this must feel really good for Jon Lam and company working on this. We’ve all worked on a project that never saw the light of day, and it can be demoralizing. There is no better way to motivate a team then make a release, and no matter when or what you release, you will always have to defend it to someone.

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