From: "John Lam (DLR)" <jflam@...>
Date: 2007-09-29T12:26:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Anyone interested In IronRuby

> From: Alex Young [mailto:alex@blackkettle.org]
>
> > Or If it is just like ruby + .Net, why didnt MS work with the
> > community to make the .Net stuff an extension to the real ruby,
> > instead of taking from the community and locking it to their
> platform?
> Licensing, in a word.  At least, that's the explanation that makes most
> sense to me...

MSFT did work quite a lot with me (aka the community) when I built the RubyCLR bridge (which, BTW is still out there and a viable alternative if folks want to use MRI and not IronRuby).

It's not a licensing issue. It's the fact that our customers want an implementation that runs natively on top of the .NET platform (aka CLR). This is exactly the same reason why folks want to run JRuby on top of the JVM.

Regardless of whether its JRuby, IronRuby or Rubinius (aka the alternative implementations), we're all bending over backwards to make sure that we stay true to the language. There are going to be a few corner cases where that is a difficult/impossible thing to do (cf continuations / performant ObjectSpace implementations), but we're all in this for the long run.

-John

PS responses will be delayed on this thread (if it continues) since I'm technically on vacation right now :)