Microsoft’s John Lam announced the availability of ready-to-use binaries of the IronRuby alpha-release at OSCON last week. You can read more about it in his blog at…
You can find the ZIP file download at…
RubyForge IronRuby Project download page
There’s no installer since it really doesn’t need one. Here’s what I did to make life a little easier for me. I installed it on both a Vista PC and an XP PC.
- Open the ZIP file using Windows Explorer. You don’t need any special software to open a ZIP file.
- Copy the folder named ironruby to C:\Program Files (on XP)
- Go to the bin subdirectory
- Right click on ir.exe and select
- Right click the Start button and select Open all useres
- Cut the shortcut from the bin subdirectory and put it where it makes sense in your Start folder/menu hierarchy.
- Rename the Shortcut to ir.exe to something else if you want. I cleverly renamed it to IronRuby on my PC
So, we now have three first-class .Net dynamic languages available for Windows XP/Vista: PowerShell, IronPython, and IronRuby. Nice.
Sorry to inject some reality here...
But IronRuby does not run real Ruby programs yet. John Lam says it best:
This takes us a big step closer towards “IronRuby runs real Ruby programs”.
So why do you consider IronRuby a first class .NET language?
Compare this with JRuby, which can run real Ruby programs. It many cases faster than MRI. Given what JRuby has already accomplished, what is the point of the IronRuby project? The JVM runs in more places than the CLR will ever run.
If you really wanted to promote something useful: lobby Microsoft to open source all of the .NET libraries, under the same or similar conditions to what Sun has done with Java. Make .NET portable in more than name.
Tom: No need to be sorry about reality :-) I consider it a first-class .Net language because that is it goal. Is it 100% there now. Nope, it is an alpha release. If you are interested in .Net for non-Windows platforms, take a look at the Mono Project