Microsoft’s Ironruby

IronRuby has recently been released by Microsoft, an effectuation of the scripting language Ruby on the .NET framework. It is through Microsoft’s new Dynamic Languages Runtime (DLR) that the languages run on .NET’s Common Language Runtime (CLR). IronRuby extends Microsoft’s support for scripting languages, joining the Ruby .NET Bridge, which connects a Ruby interpreter through a .NET virtual machine.

IronRuby, similar to IronPython will ship under Microsoft’s Permissive License (Ms-PL), a royalty-free vehicle for modification and distribution. IronRuby can be effectively used by developers for building applications incorporating Silverlight, which was recently released as a beta on Monday, and is seemingly a strong contender to Flash.

Work is already afoot to optimize PHP for .NET. Microsoft and PHP house Zend Technologies are researching a native .NET/PHP interface, speeding the performance of PHP applications that call services in Windows. As of now, PHP works through a .COM extension which considerably decelerates performance.

Phalanger is a PHP language compiler for the .NET framework and much effort is being put into this as of now. It is hosted on Microsoft’s CodePlex hosting site for open source projects.
80 per cent of PHP developers build on Windows, but deploy to Linux systems which could considerably result in lower revenues for the Microsoft business.

However, statistics reveal a good acceptance of the language. According to a SitePoint poll of 5,000 web developers in 2006 found that 24.37 per cent of developers expected to use Ruby during the next year, up from 5.31 per cent usage.

In a bid to further empower the company with ace expertise, Microsoft last year recruited John Lam who built the RubyCLR for writing .NET applications using Ruby. That followed the recruitment of Python guru Jim Hugunin.