Ironruby 0.9
We interrupt our regularly scheduled Git-TFS series to bring you this exciting news:
IronRuby 0.9 has been released!
Release Notes
It’s been a long ride since IronRuby was announced at MIX ‘07, but now all eyes are focused on getting it to 1.0. The past couple of versions have made vast compatibility and performance improvements, and 0.9 marks the last set of major features that will be added to IronRuby. From now on, all IronRuby languages will be primarily focused on bug fixing and anything else the community deems necessary to call IronRuby a 1.0 release. These improvements be delivered as point-point releases (0.9.1, 0.9.2, etc) until you decide it is ready to call 1.0.
Though IronRuby is breaking away from it’s conference-driven development schedule, this release comes only a week after OSCON 2009 where I talked about using IronRuby with Mono and Moonlight, and scripting open source apps.What's in the Release?
Library performance was a big focus for this release; basically going though the Ruby Benchmark suite and making sure any obvious slowness was fixed. As I said in my previous post about OSCON, IronRuby is approximately 2x faster than MRI when running the benchmark suite, but in the near future a complete evaluation of IronRuby’s performance will be done and published on the website.
On the compatibility front, the Win32OLE Ruby library is now available in IronRuby. This builds on top of IronRuby’s existing COM interop from version 0.5, letting you script any Windows component/application that exposes a COM interface. Though it hasn’t been fully tested yet, this will make things like Watir work on IronRuby.
Lastly, there have been interop improvements with .NET, most notably making Generic types more friendly to all the crazy things Ruby can do to them, and also with other DLR languages, making it really easy to call IronPython from IronRuby.
For more detailed information, please see the CHANGELOG (which includes all commit messages for the release ... not just "syncing to head of tfs").
You can also try IronRuby in the browser out on the CodePlex site.
Enjoy!
