Support for Dynamic Languages on .NET
I had the pleasure to experience Niclas Nilsson’s passion for Ruby last week in Switzerland. Niclas presented Ruby on Rails at the Expo-C conference and facilitated the Ruby on Rails: A Kickstart at OOPSLA. He convinced me to give Ruby and Ruby on Rails in particular another try, so I did. This weekend I installed Jon Lam’s excellent RubyCLR, a high performance bridge between Ruby and .NET. Jon Lam recently joined the CLR team at Microsoft “to help bring the love of dynamic languages out to the statically typed heathens”.
I started out by downloading and installing the latest Ruby on Rails bits (1.8.5) on a fresh virtual machine. I then downloaded and compiled the RubyCLR runtime which took some manual tweaking of the dependant libraries and link paths, since the RubyCLR is targeting the 1.8.2 version. All went fine and I was able to run the samples included with the RubyCLR. This is the hard way! My advice is in order to get started with RubyCLR to download the Ruby One-Click Installer and RubyCLR Gem. Then just follow the steps as described in Andrei’s RubyCLR installation guide.
A great guide to programming Ruby is “Programming Ruby, The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide” of which the first edition is available online for free here. The updated second edition of this book, covering Ruby 1.8 and including descriptions of all the new libraries, is available here.
The influence of dynamic languages to our enterprise platforms is going to be big. Microsoft’s hire of Jon Lam follows Sun’s hire of JRuby developers Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo to develop an implementation of Ruby on the Java Virtual Machine. Not to mention that Microsoft hired Jim Hugunin in August 2004 to join the CLR team who delivered IronPython for .NET.