Tonight I'm back on my machine, playing around a little with IronRuby, Microsoft's recently released (Pre-Alpha) ruby implementation. I just downloaded the source, (yes I said source; it's being released under Microsoft's Permissive Licence), opened the solution, and built.

Here's a screen shot of IronRuby's version of irb, called rbx.exe, an interactive Ruby shell. Notice the class return is 'mutable string', whereas in Ruby the class would just be string. I'm guessing they're avoiding name conflicts with the .Net strings, which are, of course, immutable. From John Lam's blog,

"In micro-benchmarks which measure method call performance, we are significantly faster than Ruby 1.8.6. In micro-benchmarks which measure library performance, we are on par with Ruby 1.8.6; we expect to see performance improvements in these benchmarks in the future."

In somewhat related news, Digg has abandoned Google for its online ad service, and chosen a young, innovative upstart, Microsoft. Read the gory details.


I'm not sure, but I think I actually feel good about being a Microsoft developer, at least for the moment. Weird...