Why IronRuby?

Ruby IronRuby
1

I have been having fun playing around with IronRuby but one question
keeps coming to my mind which is Why IronRuby? What purpose does it
serve?

I know we can use the simplicity of the IronRuby language to call .NET
API’s. This means we have two powers combined but will the IronRuby
interoperability with .NET get faster since currently it is extremely
slow.

I need feedback from more experienced developers that what will IronRuby
bring to the table of development?

2

We use IronRuby to provide user scripting and light weight plugins for
our
C# applications.
Cheers,
– Henon

3

way faster delivery times. For example it takes me only a fraction of
the
time to build some fairly complex things in Ruby than it would take me
to
build in C#. For example I wouldn’t have been able to build a mocker
that
resembles the design I’ve got in Caricature now in under 2 weeks with a
language like C#. Neither is it as doable in C# to build something like
ironnails which took me about 3-4 weeks to build in IronRuby.

The performance hit mostly occurs at startup time after that IronRuby is
fine IMO. Most applications I make wouldn’t be benefitting from a fast
language because most of them consume webservices/databases/read files
and
those are where most of the delays come from

If it’s a fat client app like winforms I guess it would even matter less
because you generally don’t have to deal with many concurrent calls as
you
have to do with some server architectures. If you really need the extra
performance you can go for a language like C# or something.

Extensibility of existing applications would be a big one too.
Metaprogramming some bits and pieces of your application etc…

Met vriendelijke groeten - Best regards - Salutations
Ivan Porto C.
Blog: http://flanders.co.nz
Twitter: http://twitter.com/casualjim
Author of IronRuby in Action (http://manning.com/carrero)

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 9:48 AM, Meinrad R.