I started playing with the new drop of the IronRuby source this past Labor Day Weekend but found out quickly the source would not build due to the RakeFile included with the release.? It was apparent the RakeFile was very specific to the Microsoft internal environment and it would not work for me. Thanks to the Internet and the blogging world there was some quick fixes to this problem.? First, the rubydoes.net site posted a way to make the Rakefile work and Seo posted a NANT build file to help out with the task, both worked beautifully. John Lam has also created an IronRuby home page to help people get started.? You will find a reference to a Visual Studio solution file to help out with the build. UPDATE: After loading up the recent solution file available from the IronRuby on RubyForge, I was having some problems with the build, getting crypto errors and such.? A post to the IronRuby support list reminded me I need to switch by configuration to “ExternalDebug”.? Once doing this, all is well and IronRuby builds great with Visual Studio 2005.

Technorati Tags: IronRuby

IronRuby is now on RubyForge for all to download and build, as reported by John Lam on his blog:  

It’s been nearly 6 weeks since our initial source code release at OSCON. So what’s changed?

• Exception handling
• Parallel assignment
• Instance variables

Added some more library support:

• Comparable
• Enumerable
• Array
• Hash
• String (not quite complete yet)
• Dir

This is exciting news and a good indicator things are progressing along nicely for the IronRuby team.

If you want to get the source you can follow along a nice tutorial by Aaron Junod over on rubydoes.net.

Now on to the building process….

I have been working with Ruby for quite some time now and every time I hear of new things out I like to try them out.  Most of the time it is the latest gem or technique but this time the news comes from Microsoft.

John Lam and his group at Microsoft released a source code drop of IronRuby, which is a version of Ruby running on the CLR.  IronRuby is promised to give us all the power and compatibility of Ruby 1.8.6 with all the goodness of the .NET 2.0 Runtime and beyond.

IronRuby is an open source project and will end up on RubyForge but for now is available as a download from John’s blog.  So, I downloaded, unzipped and ran the included Build.cmd and viola…

It built in just under 3 seconds….

I went to my command prompt and to the release directory and ran the resulting rbx.exe and saw the familiar >>> of Ruby’s IRB.

I tested the Ruby implementation with a few commands just to see what resulted and everything I ran worked very well.  I didn’t do any work with using .NET classes, but I will.

One interesting item I noticed was this….can you see it?

In Ruby, typing something like “Hello”.class returns a type String but in IronRuby you can see it returns MutableString which is an interesting distinction from .NET, who’s strings are immutable.   I like the attention to details like this.

I will be running some of my utility classes with IronRuby and throw together some samples that integrate to the CLR.  I will also report back what I find.  All-in-all, it looks pretty good.