From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2007-10-25T10:22:32+09:00
Subject: Re: IronRuby...will it be like J++?

John Lam (DLR) wrote:
> 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.

As another data point: JRuby's compiler (now complete, to be released in 
JRuby 1.1) was almost exclusively written by me, with a few significant 
pieces contributed by Ola Bini. But there have been dozens and dozens of 
contributors to the runtime and class libraries.

- Charlie