Iron Ruby: The Road to 1.0 - John Lam
Last session on Friday, end of TechEd Developer week. There were two sessions in this time slot that I wanted to attend – Rich Hundhausen’s “Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server: Migrate of Integrate” or John’s IronRuby. John’s information is changing almost by the day, so his session won.
Just before TechEd on May 30th at Rails Conf in Portland, OR, John demonstrated Rails running on IronRuby. While this was a “Hello World” demo it is significant because Rails exercises such a large portion of the Ruby language and is a good measure of being true to the language core. The time in which this was accomplished is also significant, about 15 months compared to about 26 months for Rubinius and about 35 months for JRuby.
Iron Ruby is significant for the broad platform base that it will run under leveraging Silverlight and MoonLight. It is open source under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL). Check out John Lam's blog for some specifics of the examples he demonstrated.
The IronRuby development pace is benefiting from the IronPython experience and is moving at a faster pace. No promises, but we may see IronRuby 1.0 by the end of the year. Go Team!
