John Lam has released the latest IronRubybits, which is very very promising. It is refreshing that this will be released on Ruby Forge, and that the DLR will indeed embrace the open source community. Microsoft’s Developer Division seems to be on the right track with these releases.
Saphire Steel is a current ruby integration solution with Visual Studio 2005, so with these two together it will be an amazing combination. Maybe Microsoft will just buy out this add in and integrate it, that way it will get a lot more traction as a killer ruby implementation (awesome language extensions, with intellisense and all that)
Next up is integrating IronRuby with ASP.NET as a RoR framework. I think this is a good answer to LAMP, since this could be a next generation mesh that propels Microsoft into an exciting realm. The last time I saw anything as intriguing as this was when PowerShell was released.
What is an important notice, is that IronRuby is written in C#, I am curious if Microsoft will ever self-host IronRuby, or if it will be written in C# forever. I think since this should be distributed and the release is using msbuild based on .net 2.0 CLR, it probably won’t self-host for a while . I was always curious how you get a self-hosted compiler, it is a great goal, cause it means you have true faith in your compiler, it can compile itself, almost like self-actualization.
more coming soon…
So How does IronRuby compare against Gardens Point Ruby? Do these products really compete against eachother?
Yes these would be competing languages, but now the main difference is that IronRuby will be created by Microsoft, and with that based on the DLR while Gardens Point is doing its own “DLR” with ruby, the way the DLR is expected to work is that it will be used by any Dynamic Languages, like IronPython, IronRuby, Visual Basic X, and Managed Javascript(forgive the naming i think there are 4 main dynamic languages supported on DLR for now) all taking advantage of DLR and then also supported for Silverlight support.
I am not familiar with Gardens Point, however i think IronRuby and DLR will have its own CoreCLR supporting security (using transparent (http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnfa/archive/2005/08/31/458641.aspx) security in .net 2.0)