From: "John Lam (DLR)" <jflam@...>
Date: 2007-10-25T09:24:10+09:00
Subject: Re: IronRuby...will it be like J++?

Diego Suarez:

> Hi John, I was asking myself how much is Microsoft betting on dynamic
> languages like Ruby, Python et al. I mean, they look interested because
> they 're hiring people, but IronRuby (if I'm not wrong) is in pre-alpha
> and has a very small team...I'm sure Microsoft is not giving the
> Iron(.*) projects the importance they deserve.

You don't need a large team to build a compiler. Most compiler dev teams are actually quite small (IIRC Delphi's compiler dev team was 3 people). IronPython was maybe 4 dev-years worth of time in it. The D programming language is 1 guy.

Where you do need a large team is to build all of the surrounding infrastructure around a compiler - docs for the language, integration with IDEs, build systems, libraries, support etc.

> I heard that in Silverlight 1.1 IronRuby is going to be one of the
> alternatives to use, but I'm a bit puzzled, because SilverLight seems
> to advance much faster than IronRuby...

A lot of people incorrectly believe that IronRuby is the "Silverlight scripting language". IronRuby will run everywhere the CLR or CoreCLR (the version of the CLR in Silverlight) will run. So that spans desktops, servers, Macs, Linux + Mono etc.

Silverlight and Ruby are two different technologies, so comparing their rates of progress is tantamount to saying that Windows is advancing faster than C# :)

Hope that helps,
-John