John Lam announced on his blog that the IronRuby team has successfully processed some simple requests with an unmodified copy of Rails. The plan is to show off this achievement at RailsConf this week.
Congratulations to the team for many accomplishments in a short amount of time:
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.
This is great news for the alternative Ruby implementations and getting IronRuby into the mainstream. I blogged about what I feel is the win for developers with milestones like this in the past.
John indicates there is still a lot to do but the future is bright:
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.
RailsConf should be a real bustle with the alternative Ruby implementations consisting or IronRuby, Rubinius and JRuby. This is good for all of the Ruby developers out there and getting our applications running on many different operating systems and language runtimes.