John Lam was at OSCON and stopped by the Portland .NET Users Group and did session. Someone, probably Scott Hanselman, had a video camera and taped the whole session. Scott got the video and posted it on his site as a Silverlight streaming video. It’s pretty slick. There’s a lot of fun banter between Scott and John.
I’ll warn you now – he’s not going to teach you IronRuby in this video. He assumes a lot of knowledge around dynamic languages in general and a little bit about Ruby in particular. Some of the bits that he gets into are deep in the framework. He talks quite a lot about how the method invocation and object creation bits work, performance and . It’s fascinating stuff.
Fun trivia that will make you popular at parties:
- .NET’s GetType() on an object is 69 machine cycles.
- MS-Permissive license has been submitted to OSI for approval. If they approve it, then we can officially say that we are doing open source. Otherwise we are just sharing code.
It was also fun to hear him talk about why he can’t go look at the source code for the Mats Ruby Interpreter. Since he can’t, he asks a lot of “silly questions” on mailing lists asking about inputs and outputs of particular APIs and the like.
Since they are working on the language still – they have been doing their best to get to a point where they can run the standard TestUnit, RSpec or even mini-spec. These testing frameworks use way too many features of the Ruby language so they can’t get it to run at the moment. John, created a simple mini-spec that does some really lightweight testing and specing. The goal, obviously, is to be able to run a full suite of tests against Ruby and IronRuby to be as close as possible on the original implementation.
Another bit that very good was that John said that getting Rails running on IronRuby is the only way that anyone will believe that it’s Ruby. It’s good that they are taking that very seriously.
John asks – “Would it be valuable to get Ruby running on ASP.NET?” – I’d love to hear the answer to that question myself. Feel free to leave comments or contact me directly
Scott’s original post on the topic is – Silverlight Video of John Lam on IronRuby at PADNUG
Direct link to the video – http://www.hanselman.com/silverlight/johnlamonironruby/