Welcome, Wayne Kelly!

Yesterday, Wayne Kelly (the leader of the Ruby.net project) announced[1] that he was going to refocus his efforts on IronRuby. We would like to extend a warm welcome to Wayne, and we invite anyone else who wants to work on IronRuby to join our Open Source project. Microsoft Research funded a portion of the development of Ruby.net, and their parser lives on in IronRuby thanks to the excellent work that Wayne did in producing the Gardens Point Parser Generator.

Having a single implementation on the CLR makes sense for the .NET community. Ruby isn't defined just by the language. It's defined by the programs that it runs. The hardest part of our project isn't getting the language right (although it certainly isn't easy) it's making sure that IronRuby runs Ruby programs. And regardless of what the Rails-haters say these days, Rails is an important program.

Joining forces lets us get avoid duplicating effort. More people working in parallel on libraries means that folks will get a working Ruby on .NET that runs real programs sooner. And that's goodness for everyone, from the contributors who want to see their code used, to devs who want to write Ruby programs on the .NET platform.

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I'm sure that many of you have already watched Randy Pausch's Last Lecture. If you haven't already, you should carve out about an hour and watch it when you have some quiet time alone. It's an amazing talk that you won't forget, particularly if you have kids.

[1] Here's Wayne's email in its entirety:

Ruby.NET started life in 2005 as an academic research project with the goals of learning more about the challenges of mapping a dynamic language such as Ruby onto the relatively static CLI platform. When we released our first beta in 2006, many people got excited and started blogging about the project, at which time the project took on a life of its own heading towards a production quality release that people could one day actually use. The release of IronRuby last year obviously caused us to question this unstated goal. At the time we didn't know if the IronRuby project and the DLR would succeed, so we decided to continue with Ruby.NET at that stage. Last week at the Lang.NET Symposium, I presented our work on the Ruby.NET project and also had the opportunity to learn more about the progress of the IronRuby project and the inner workings of the DLR (and also the JRuby project presented by Charles Nutter).

I've come to the conclusion that the DLR is clearly here to stay - it's becoming an even more important part of the Microsoft platform. I also believe that to obtain production quality performance, Ruby.NET would need to reinvent (or adopt) something equivalent to the DLR. If we were starting the project today, there is no way we wouldn't use the DLR. Whilst Ruby.NET initially had a good head start on the IronRuby project; by incorporating the Ruby.NET parser and scanner and by leveraging the DLR, I now believe that IronRuby is more likely to succeed as a production quality implementation of Ruby on the .NET platform. I believe that ultimately there is no need for two different implementations of Ruby on .NET. So, if Ruby.NET is ultimately not going to be that implementation, then we should not waste further developer effort fruitlessly chasing that goal. There is still a massive amount `of work required to achieve full semantic compatibility, to achieve production quality performance and to get Rails to run robustly.

There have already been a number of practical and research outcomes from the Ruby.NET project, however, at this stage, I believe we (the Ruby.NET community) can make the biggest impact by levering our experiences with Ruby.NET to contribute to the IronRuby and DLR projects. Personally, I still feel we have unfinished business - we set our selves the goal of running Rails on .NET and we haven't achieved that yet. If we can leverage our experience to help IronRuby get to that point, then I'd at least have the personal satisfaction of helping see the job completed.

These are just my views. As a researcher, my prime interest is not in developing products, but in developing innovative new ideas and having an impact by having those ideas used in the real world. I'm aware that others in the community will have different goals and so will presumably have a different take on this - I'm keen to hear what you think. If anyone wants to press ahead, then the code base is still owned and controlled by you the community, so you are free to do with it as you please with our full blessing.

I'd also like to make it very clear that this decision is entirely my own - based on research and technical considerations. Microsoft did not in any way suggest or encourage us to kill the project and we thank them again for their support of the project.

I'd like to thank all of our contributors and supporters and apologize if this decision comes as a disappointment. I hope many of you will join me in contributing to the IronRuby project and see it through to a successful completion.

Cheers, Wayne. 

Comments

[Robbie]

Thank you for sharing the "Last Lecture". Best. Advice. Ever.

[SoftMind]

I also welcome Wayne Kelly.

His support for Ruby.Net was great and we hope to taste better fruits with this support for IronRuby as well.

Thanks.

SoftMind

[Michael Letterle]

I have a feeling IronRuby is going to get a big boost from this. :)