IronRuby on the road to version 1.0

The IronRuby developers have announced the release of version 0.9 of their open source implementation of the Ruby programming language for the Microsoft .NET Framework. According to the announcement blog post by developer Jimmy Schementi, the 0.9 release marks the last set of major features that will be added to IronRuby. Upcoming releases will focus on fixing bugs and "anything else the community deems necessary to call IronRuby a 1.0 release".

One of the major focuses in the 0.9 release was improving library performance by "making sure any obvious slowness was fixed". A recent benchmark comparison between IronRuby 0.9, Ruby 1.8.6 and Ruby 1.9.1 on Windows shows that the latest release of IronRuby is now well ahead of Ruby 1.8.6.

The Win32OLE Ruby library has now been added to IronRuby, allowing users to script any Windows component or application that exposes a COM (Component Object Model) interface. Improvements have also been made to interoperability with .NET, making Generic types "more friendly" and making it possible to call other Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) languages like IronPython from IronRuby.

More details about the release can be found in the release notes and Schementi's announcement blog post. IronRuby 0.9 is available to download from the project's site and its code is hosted on GitHub. IronRuby is released under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL).

(crve)