A letter on the Ruby.NET mailing list just announced that Dr. Wayne Kelly have decided to shut down the Ruby.NET project and instead asks everyone to contribute to IronRuby.
More information can be found on the mailing list thread here.
I don't like these news at all. In many ways having a strong competitor is something that will improve the ecosystem for everyone. Now IronRuby will become the only player on the field - unless other people (like Ted Neward and David Peterson) decide to pick up Ruby.NET. I hope someone does. The .NET world will be better of for it.
The crucial question is not whether we trust John Lam about IronRuby. The question is if we trust Microsoft to do the right thing. Do we?
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I like the comment that M David Peterson made in the interview I did with him:
Why should we trust Microsoft?
"M. David: You shouldn’t. At least as it relates to whether or not MSFT will do the “right thing” when that right thing is a choice between what’s right for the development community and what’s right for their share holders. MSFT is a profit driven company and will make their decisions based on what will generate revenue and what will not."
"But in the case of the MPL’d projects, you don’t have to trust them. ..."
Seems to be a non-issue to other projects like Mono, read what Miguel de Guasa has to say about the matter:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Jul-27.html
This is sad news indeed. I think it does illustrate how difficult it is to run a .NET open source project. But when I read this thread I got the impression that Dr. Kelly was reporting on what he had seen at Lang.NET and was merely suggesting folks support IronRuby based on what he had seen. I didn't see where he suggested killing the project.
As far as not trusting Microsoft, no - we shouldn't just blindly trust Microsoft. But we shouldn't blindly trust Sun with JRuby either. (Not that there is anything to complain about.) I can see three options we have if/when Microsoft violates that trust:
1) Fork IronRuby
2) Turn our attention to Ruby.NET
3) Create a new implementation based on the Rubinius core.
Personally, I really like the third approach. _If_ it comes to that.
Ruby.Net is a cool project, but I don't see any reason why it's vital to the .Net platform to have two competing Ruby implementations any more than it's vital to have an alternative to JRuby on the JVM. And if you don't want to use Microsoft technology, I can't imagine that running on .Net is going to be palatable, regardless of what Ruby implementation you use.
And, of course, as others have pointed out, both the DLR and IronRuby are released under MSPL, which means that an open source version should always be an option to run on Mono, even if it requires forking from the Microsoft code base someday.
Personally, I think the technical advantages of the DLR for language implementations on the .Net platform are significant, even though a lot of people haven't really sorted through them yet.
Among other things, clean interop with other dynamic languages is an engaging prospect -- if there's a cool Python library someone has written, you can just call it right from Ruby with no mess involved. How cool is that?
"if there's a cool Python library someone has written, you can just call it right from Ruby with no mess involved. How cool is that?"
-> Well, almost as cool as the future MOP exchange protocol between JRuby, Jython and others...
Cheers.
So ... who's going to revive the XRuby project so that y'all can get some competition in the Java space? :)
"who's going to revive the XRuby project so that y'all can get some competition in the Java space? :)"
Who's gonna tell Xue that it's dead? The xruby guys have been pretty busy with other things (needing to earn a living kinda stinks), but they're still working on things.
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