John Lam announced a couple big things today. One was the announcement about our IronRuby Alpha Release. Another is the announcement of the IronRuby Contribs project and Silverline. This is exciting because it is a chance for us to give some of our ideas back to the community.

The final one, and the one that is the most exciting to me, is the announcement of our ability to contribute back to the RubySpec and MSpec projects. These projects are a key to our ability to write a conforming Ruby implementation. They are writing a spec for the otherwise unspeced Ruby language. We’ve been using the since before I started, and we’ve added some specs, modified some to run on Windows, and added a few guards to properly define how IronRuby should behave compared to the spec. Up til now, those have lived in our repositories. This announcement means we can start giving the changes back to the community.

I’ve been looking forward to this, largely because it means less duplicate work. I’ve been spending time getting the specs to run on CRuby for Windows, in addition to getting IronRuby running those same specs. It’s nice to know that this work won’t be wasted, or have to be duplicated. I’m also excited to be working with people from CRuby, JRuby, Rubinius and YARV. These are some really smart people that are working to give our language a little bit of guidance, and hopefully consistency, and I’m excited to help.