IronRuby dispatched some simple requests through an unmodified copy of Rails a few days ago. Today, we’re going to show off our progress live at RailsConf. This is an important milestone for IronRuby; it’s our ‘ticket to entry’ to the world of alternative Ruby implementations.
We started our work on IronRuby back in February 2007. Now, just 15 months later, we’ve reached what others are calling the “Rails Singularity”. A few folks claimed that we would never get here this quickly, or that we wouldn’t be allowed to accomplish this goal. But we did it on our own, in our own way and with help from our community. And we’re just getting started.
I have always maintained that you must judge us based on our actions and not our words. Running Rails shows that we are serious when we say that we are going to create a Ruby that runs real Ruby programs. And there isn’t any a more real Ruby program than Rails. This demonstrates that we’re true to the language, and that we’ve put compatibility above all else on our TODO lists.
But we have a lot more work to do.
Our performance is nowhere near where we expect it to be, particularly in startup of a large application like Rails. We are consuming much more memory than we would like to. But this is the price you pay when you put compatibility ahead of all other work. We’ve shown that we are willing to do what it takes to run Rails. Now we have to do the work to make it run better, and faster.
But there are other things to talk about as well.
IronRuby doesn’t just let you run Rails; it lets you interact with the rich set of libraries provided by .NET. You’ll be able to use IronRuby to build server-based applications that run on top of ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC. You’ll be able to use IronRuby to build client applications that run on top of WPF or Silverlight. You’ll be able to use IronRuby to test, build and deploy your .NET applications. You’ll be able to run Ruby code in your web browser and have it talk to your Ruby code on your web server. That’s a feature that we feel that many folks will enjoy.
Perhaps even more important than all of this technical stuff is what the IronRuby project represents at Microsoft. IronRuby has pioneered a number of new processes that make it easier for other folks at the company to build and release Open Source products. What we learn from building IronRuby will be applied in other product groups to help us become more open and transparent than we have been in the past. We have a great leadership team that is willing to push the envelope on openness and transparency to create a world where both Microsoft and our customers can benefit.
Come join our project on Rubyforge and help us show everyone how it’s done!
