Very cool to hear from someone at Microsoft. My concern, on reading the
above, is that Mono apps work great when going from Microsoft to Linux,
but not all Mono apps work great when going from Linux to Microsoft.
My two cents on this thread…
Ruby has a lot of momentum and it’s hard for me to believe that anything
MS or Sun or whoever does will cause some terrible problem with
developing Ruby applications or cause Ruby to die.
All that said, we have all seen language implementations that were not
compatible across all operating systems and code that worked fine with
the one compiler, but not with another companies compiler. I’m thinking
of some of the C++ inconsistencies here, not recent history:-)
So, will all the implementations of Ruby be kept pure and compatible? I
would guess not, if the future is like the past. However, in this arena
everyone seems to be trying to accomplish just that, keep every
implementation pure and compatible.
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#
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 B… But there have been dozens and dozens of
contributors to the runtime and class libraries.
Are you talking about library compatibility or are there runtime compatibility issues? If the latter, this would seem to be something that is either:
a) a bug in one of our implementations vs. the CLI spec or
b) something unclear in the CLI spec
Both a) and b) have happened and we’ve been able to resolve those issues with the Mono team. There’s also the other issue where their implementation tends to lag behind the latest versions of the CLR / C# as well, but that’s more of a resourcing problem rather than a technical one (I’m sure they could use more help on their project too!)
-John
The general concern:
“The Microsoft compatibility stack provides a pathway for porting
Windows .NET applications to Linux. This group of components include ADO.NET, ASP.NET, and Windows.Forms, among others. As these components
are not covered by ECMA standards, some of them remain subject to
patent fears and concerns.”
Since I have a lot of respect for your opinion, I did in fact race off
to rent the movie.
Though, long-winded (like myself), I found it very interesting. This
obviously is no place for a movie review, so I’ll just say that the
collusion factor brought up was weird
