So IronRuby has been released in a pre-alpha state... check out the comments on John Lam's post for some additional details not in the post itself.


Things of interest:

• Lots of stuff doesn't work just yet ;o)
• it will end up on Rubyforge, not Codeplex... and I think it's quite an appropriate decision considering the nature of the project... good to see common sense winning over marketing dogma - and it's going to be there by the end of August.
  
• The project will eventually be entirely open to community contributions (I don't think that includes the code making up the DLR itself, as a shared platform that's probably something that needs to be tightly controlled)
  

Has anyone had a chance to really dig into the DLR??... I've briefly browsed the source code in IronPython 2.0 for the Microsoft.Scripting project, it looks promising... but I really need to sit down and write myself a simple little DSL from end-to-end to get a handle on it (when I get time, I'll be sure to post a mini-series on it ;o)

Things I have been wondering though are:

• Is it possible to decorate dynamic classes with attributes yet? (i.e. create say an WCF message class and decorate it with [DataMember] attributes dynamically) - no attribute support in IronPython 1.x was a problem for Ivan a while ago.
  
• Are continuations supported (and how) ?
• Just how well does the language mixing work... Can I grab an instance of an IronPython class and change just a single instances methods using features particular to (Iron)Ruby
  

I'd love to know a few things, but just don't have the time at the moment to find out right now.

Also I wonder if pushing IronPython & IronRuby into the mainstream is going to see a surge in interest for projects like FePy ?  I still feel the value proposition for a lot of the dynamic languages on the CLR/DLR is weakened by the fact that the BCL isn't as much fun to use from a dynamic langauge as the native equivalents for the ruby or python (or certainly makes it difficult to port python or ruby knowledge of the managed equivalents) ... I'm sure I could write a YAML parser in C# that would be "good" - but it's not going to feel as nice to use as say Why's Syck parser which is built with dynamic languages in mind.