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InfoQ Homepage News IronRuby now on Rubyforge

IronRuby now on Rubyforge

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Microsoft's Ruby implementation for .NET was first released in July 2007, and was available with all its source code. Now the IronRuby project is hosted on RubyForge. RubyForge provides various services such as a Bug database and  a Subversion source repository.

At this time, there are no released files to download, so getting the source means checking it out from the repository using a Subversion client. Developers not familiar with Subversion, can refer to the quick tour by Aaron Junod at the rubydoes.net blog:
First download and install Subversion, or a compatible client like TortoiseSVN. If you choose to install the command line tools, shell out to a DOS prompt and type “svn help” to make sure your path is setup correctly. If not, reboot. If you choose Tortoise it will require a reboot. Once you have one of those installed, now you will need to get the latest version of the code.
If you are using the command line, typing:

  svn co http://ironruby.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/ IronRuby

will get the latest version of the code into the folder IronRuby. If you are using Tortoise, create a folder named IronRuby, right click on it, and choose SVN Check out. then provide

 http://ironruby.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/ as a path.

For a quick peek at the code without having to check it out from Subversion, RubyForge also provides a Web based interface to the source repository for IronRuby.

The current version of the code contains improvements over the previously released version. IronRuby's John Lam lists a few enhancements:
So what's changed? 
  • Exception handling
  • Parallel assignment
  • Instance variables

Added some more library support:

  • Comparable
  • Enumerable
  • Array
  • Hash
  • String (not quite complete yet)
  • Dir

With the great interest in Ruby on the .NET platform, M. David Peterson calls for a Labor day Hackfest to improve both Ruby implementations for .NET:
This Saturday… day, day < Sunday... day, day, and < Monday... day, day *ONLY*, the IronRuby and Ruby.NET Labor Day Weekend *HACKFEST* Extravaganza is coming to an IRC channel near you,
irc://irc.freenode.net/#ironruby
- and -
irc://irc.freenode.net/#ruby.net
Ruby.NET is another implementation of Ruby for .NET, that was made available on Google Code. For more information about Ruby.NET see this InfoQ interview about the project.

Are  you planning contribute to one of these Ruby implementations? Which one would you chose?

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