July 23rd, 2007

IronRuby pre-alpha release available

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 2:40 pm

Categories: .NET 3.0, Microsoft, Silverlight, WPF

Tags: Developer, Adobe Systems Inc., Microsoft .NET, Microsoft Corp., Ryan Stewart

John Lam and Scott Guthrie both have posts about the pre-alpha availability of IronRuby, a Ruby implementation for .NET. IronRuby is one of four languages that will be supported in .NET via the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) that Microsoft announced at MIX. The others are IronPython, JavaScript and Dynamic VB. According to Scott there is a lot that isn’t supported yet but most of the core language support is implemented. The release today is primarily aimed at developers. Microsoft is going to accept source code contributions to the IronRuby libraries so this early build gives those developers who are interested in contributing a chance to check it out and start hacking away.

Why does this matter?
The release today is a pretty geeky one and a read through of John and Scott’s posts may be a bit over your head (it’s a bit over mine in places). But there’s a couple of significant points here. Because the .NET runtime is no longer limited to Windows thanks to Silverlight, this news affects any developer who wants to create cross-platform applications. But it also shows that Microsoft is continuing to fight for new types of developers. This release gives Ruby developers a stake in WPF and Silverlight. The pre-alpha brings them into the process very early and means they can now quickly start tinkering with .NET.

Giving developers flexibility seems to be the name of the game right now. We (Adobe) are doing it with Adobe AIR with support for HTML and Flash and Microsoft is doing it with it’s significant support of dynamic languages such as Python and Ruby. In the end, I think this is all good for developers and hopefully you guys feel that both Microsoft and Adobe are empowering you to create cool things. That’s what it’s about.