IronRuby Presages Dynamic .NET

A prerelease version of IronRuby, Microsoft’s .NET implementation of the popular Ruby programming language, is now available. Ruby is an open source programming language that is most often combined with Rails, a framework for building Web applications. The combination, called Ruby on Rails, is particularly popular with developers using the Apache Web server, although it also works with Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS). The work Microsoft has done for Ruby will also help the .NET Framework support other popular programming languages.

IronRuby is an implementation of Ruby designed for the .NET Framework. Ruby is one of several increasingly popular dynamic languages, which perform some operations at runtime that other languages perform only during compilation. For example, with languages such as C#, the complete set of functions that an object can perform is fixed when the program is compiled, and it is an error for a program to attempt to call a function that isn’t defined. With dynamic languages such as Ruby, definitions can be altered while the program is running. However, there is no strict definition of what features make a language dynamic, and some languages blur the distinction by combing dynamic features with traditional programming languages.