Two efforts to deliver an implementation of the Ruby language on the .Net platform have merged into one. Or have they?
Rather than continue to chase the same goal, Wayne Kelly, a lecturer
at the Queensland University of Technology and the lead on the Ruby.Net
project, said he is refocusing his efforts on Microsoft's IronRuby
implementation. The Queensland University of Technology is based in
Brisbane, Australia.
However, some supporters of the Ruby.Net project are considering
keeping it going as a “stepping stone” while IronRuby is being
developed.
Kelly, who presented the progress of the Ruby.Net project Jan.
29 at the Lang.Net conference on Microsoft's Redmond, Wash., campus,
announced Feb. 4 that he now plans to support the IronRuby effort.
In a blog post Feb.
5, John Lam, a Microsoft engineer who is heading up the IronRuby
project, extended a “warm welcome to Wayne, and we invite anyone else
who wants to work on IronRuby to join our Open Source project.
Microsoft Research funded a portion of the development of Ruby.net, and
their parser lives on in IronRuby thanks to the excellent work that
Wayne did in producing the Gardens Point Parser Generator."
Meanwhile, in an e-mail to the Ruby.Net Compiler Discussion group posted
late Feb. 4, Kelly said he felt no need to continue work on the
Ruby.Net effort because Microsoft's DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) "is
clearly here to stay—it's becoming an even more important part of the
Microsoft platform. I also believe that to obtain production quality
performance, Ruby.NET would need to reinvent (or adopt) something
equivalent to the DLR. If we were starting the project today, there is
no way we wouldn't use the DLR."
Ruby.Net started as a Microsoft-funded research project to place a
Ruby implementation on the Microsoft CLI (Common Language
Infrastructure). The project released its first beta last year. Kelly
said his team began feeling confident about delivering a production
release of the technology. Yet, "the release of IronRuby last year
obviously caused us to question this unstated goal." he said. "At the
time we didn't know if the IronRuby project and the DLR would succeed,
so we decided to continue with Ruby.NET at that stage."
However, "last week at the Lang.NET Symposium, I presented our work
on the Ruby.NET project and also had the opportunity to learn more
about the progress of the IronRuby project and the inner workings of
the DLR," Kelly said in his e-mail. "Whilst Ruby.NET initially had a
good head start on the IronRuby project; by incorporating the Ruby.NET
parser and scanner and by leveraging the DLR, I now believe that
IronRuby is more likely to succeed as a production quality
implementation of Ruby on the .NET platform. I believe that ultimately
there is no need for two different implementations of Ruby on .NET. So,
if Ruby.NET is ultimately not going to be that implementation, then we
should not waste further developer effort fruitlessly chasing that
goal."
Thus, said Kelly: "I believe we (the Ruby.NET community) can make
the biggest impact by [leveraging] our experiences with Ruby.NET to
contribute to the IronRuby and DLR projects."
