From: Robert Feldt <feldt@...>
Date: 2004-04-25T02:28:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby on .NET (was Re: A Ruby WishList)

James, Roshan (Cognizant) wrote:

>//Since CLR/.NET etc... is designed for statically typed 
>//languages and have penalties like casting involved, will 
>//using it be a good thing?
>
>Good question - to be honest I am not sure how dynamic typing is can be
>done in the way it is presently done in Ruby. I would expect that some
>of the reflection API will come into play that can generates types at
>runtime. Such code may have slow startup times but could potentially run
>as fast as other managed code. 
>
>  
>
Yes, the approach we are taking is to generate most things dynamically. 
If you do that it seems the CLR actually can give you a lot of freedom.

>To be honest I don't know how Jim Hugunin has solved some of these
>issues for his IronPython - his notes indicate that IronPython is fast,
>faster than traditional C python. Look at this blog entry for relevant
>links:
>http://www.hole.fi/jajvirta/weblog/20031210T0901.html
>  
>
>  
>
Unfortunately, Jim has talked very little about the technical details so 
far.

However, for a majority of Ruby's dynamism we have spikes that show how 
to solve them; for the rest I'm more skeptical. In particular, I don't 
see continuations happening, threads will be different and probably some 
other things I forget about now... ;)

Regards,

Robert