I thought I'd answer some more questions that have shown up around the web about the DLR. I was out for a short vacation before getting back to the office middle of this week.

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  1. Is the CoreCLR available for a standalone download?

    No. It's designed to be used with Silverlight. Jamie Cansdale has figured out how to extract the assemblies out of the redist and run a console application using it. Why? Because it makes sense to be able to run your unit tests using the target runtime.

  2. Is the DLR itself available for standalone download?

    Not at this time. Right now you can download it as part of the IronPython 2.0 Alpha release on Codeplex.

  3. Will I be able to host the DLR myself in my own .NET applications?

    Yes. We have a generic hosting API, and we internally have a number of hosts built using it, including a console host for the desktop CLR, various test harnesses for our test team etc.

  4. Does JS support generics?

    Not with this release, but it is on the roadmap.

  5. Is the DLR just IronPython's libraries pulled out into a reusable form?

    At a certain level, this is true (a simple example is the BigInteger type). However, it does go considerably deeper than this. The DLR has a more ambitious goal of unifying the programming model of static languages and dynamic languages in the most efficient way possible. For details on this, see Jim Hugunin's two posts on The One True Object, particularly Part 2.

  6. What about languages beyond the four (IronPython, IronRuby, JScript, and VB) that Microsoft is building? Can the DLR actually be used by folks outside the company?

    At the time of this writing, it's exactly 11 days since we shipped bits to the world. Peter Fisk is making good progress porting his Smalltalk implementation to the DLR.