Groklaw says "Watch out, Ruby!"

L

Lyle Johnson

PJ raises a warning cry about IronRuby: "Uh Oh. Another Smooth Move
from Microsoft: Watch out, Ruby. Watch out OSI." [http://
www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070730120109643]

I'm not sure I understand what this has to do with Ruby. The
implication seems to be that because Microsoft's IronRuby is released
under a license that isn't approved by OSI, that the Ruby community
at large had better "watch out".

With all due to respect to John Lam and the other IronRuby
developers, is anyone taking IronRuby all that seriously?
 
A

Alex Young

Lyle said:
PJ raises a warning cry about IronRuby: "Uh Oh. Another Smooth Move
from Microsoft: Watch out, Ruby. Watch out OSI." [http://
www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070730120109643]

I'm not sure I understand what this has to do with Ruby. The implication
seems to be that because Microsoft's IronRuby is released under a
license that isn't approved by OSI, that the Ruby community at large had
better "watch out".

With all due to respect to John Lam and the other IronRuby developers,
is anyone taking IronRuby all that seriously?
Very, but not for the reason you'd think. If IronRuby pans out, and if
SilverLight 1.1 does what it says on the tin, getting Ruby installed on
a client's machine becomes a no-op.
 
S

SonOfLilit

With all due to respect to John Lam and the other IronRuby
developers, is anyone taking IronRuby all that seriously?

I am.

It'll probably be the first "ruby" compiler to reach 1.0 and it allows
one to replace ActionScript with Ruby. Or so I hope.

I'll HAVE to have a look just because of these two possibilities.


Aur
 
A

Alex Young

Alex said:
Lyle said:
PJ raises a warning cry about IronRuby: "Uh Oh. Another Smooth Move
from Microsoft: Watch out, Ruby. Watch out OSI." [http://
www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070730120109643]

I'm not sure I understand what this has to do with Ruby. The
implication seems to be that because Microsoft's IronRuby is released
under a license that isn't approved by OSI, that the Ruby community at
large had better "watch out".

With all due to respect to John Lam and the other IronRuby developers,
is anyone taking IronRuby all that seriously?
Very, but not for the reason you'd think. If IronRuby pans out, and if
SilverLight 1.1 does what it says on the tin, getting Ruby installed on
a client's machine becomes a no-op.
Another question: is there any reason that, say, Rubinius' standard
libraries couldn't be used with IronRuby? Has anyone looked? What's
their implementation status at the moment?
 
G

Gregory Brown

Another question: is there any reason that, say, Rubinius' standard
libraries couldn't be used with IronRuby? Has anyone looked? What's
their implementation status at the moment?

The MRI stdlibs are (mostly) Ruby and should be freely reusable. I'd
be sort of surprised if alternative implementers bother implementing
more than they have to with these, unless they need to tweak the
existing libs for their implementations.
 
A

Alex Young

Gregory said:
The MRI stdlibs are (mostly) Ruby and should be freely reusable. I'd
be sort of surprised if alternative implementers bother implementing
more than they have to with these, unless they need to tweak the
existing libs for their implementations.
I'm sure you're right, I can't see many technical reasons not to use the
standard implementation. However, John Lam is specifically asking for
contributions to the IronRuby stdlib. I don't know what assignments
you'd have to make to get them accepted, and I haven't seen it discussed
anywhere. John, are you reading? Can you give us a steer on this?
 
G

Gregory Brown

I'm sure you're right, I can't see many technical reasons not to use the
standard implementation. However, John Lam is specifically asking for
contributions to the IronRuby stdlib. I don't know what assignments
you'd have to make to get them accepted, and I haven't seen it discussed
anywhere. John, are you reading? Can you give us a steer on this?

Oh, he can't use the implementations because I think the license is
incompatible :-/
 
A

Alex Young

Gregory said:
Oh, he can't use the implementations because I think the license is
incompatible :-/
That's why I mentioned rubinius - it's BSD-licensed, isn't it?
 
B

Ben Bleything

The operative word is compiler. JRuby is a ruby runtime/interpreter, but it
does not compile source down to bytecode. IronRuby is a compiler to CLR
bytecode plus runtime libraries.

Ah, that was a misconception on my part. I thought jruby compiled to
jvm bytecode. My mistake, sorry :)

Ben
 
A

Ari Brown

Does any know any good instructions for installing IronRuby on Mac OS X?

Or of any good (easy to use) compiler for Ruby?

Thanks,
---------------------------------------------------------------|
~Ari
"I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it" --1337est
man alive
 
A

Alex Young

Ari said:
Does any know any good instructions for installing IronRuby on Mac OS X?
There are only just working instructions for building it on Windows :)
It may in time be supported by Mono, but the DLR is still a moving
target so I wouldn't expect that just yet.
Or of any good (easy to use) compiler for Ruby?
IronRuby will be the first, assuming all is as it appears. At least, to
the best of my knowledge. I may be spouting gibberish - I've been
writing c# for 16 hours, so all bets are off :)
 
G

Gregory Brown

That's why I mentioned rubinius - it's BSD-licensed, isn't it?

What I'm saying is that my guess is that Rubinius would use the MRI
implementations rather than wasting time building them from scratch.
MIT License is compatible with the License of Ruby + GPL, i think
IronRuby's license isn't.

When you use parts of a project that are under a different license,
you usually can't change the license terms without permission. Which
means the Rubinius standard library would be under License of Ruby,
not MIT, if they use the MRI implementations.
 
S

SonOfLilit

Rubinius are building ruby implementations of the part of the standard
library that is implemented in C, AFAIK.

Do they also reimplement the ruby part?


Aur
 
A

Alex Young

Gregory said:
What I'm saying is that my guess is that Rubinius would use the MRI
implementations rather than wasting time building them from scratch.
MIT License is compatible with the License of Ruby + GPL, i think
IronRuby's license isn't.
Taking another look at the Rubinius project page, it seems that they
have, indeed, imported the 1.8 MRI stdlib. I need more coffee.
When you use parts of a project that are under a different license,
you usually can't change the license terms without permission. Which
means the Rubinius standard library would be under License of Ruby,
not MIT, if they use the MRI implementations.
Yup, agreed - this tangent was entirely inspired by the false assumption
(on my part) that for some reason there was a large part of stdlib being
recoded as part of the rubinius project.
 
J

John Lam (CLR)

I'm sure you're right, I can't see many technical reasons not to use the
standard implementation. However, John Lam is specifically asking for
contributions to the IronRuby stdlib. I don't know what assignments
you'd have to make to get them accepted, and I haven't seen it discussed
anywhere. John, are you reading? Can you give us a steer on this?

There are quite a few stdlib libraries that are implemented in C - those ar=
e the ones that we need help with. We're making good progress on the built-=
in types (another dev on our team just checked in a nearly complete impleme=
ntation for Hash yesterday).

As for assignments, we will have a standard contributor agreement that will=
assert that you have the legal right to contribute the code that you are s=
ubmitting, as well as a copyright assignment. This is a very standard proce=
ss in open source projects (see Apache's contributor agreement here: http:/=
/apache.org/licenses/icla.txt).

Thanks,
-John
 
J

John Lam (CLR)

Does any know any good instructions for installing IronRuby on Mac OS

I'm pretty sure that Seo Sanghyeon has IronRuby building on top of Mono now=
He hasn't published instructions yet, but I suspect those will be forthco=
ming soon.

-John
 

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