Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Early Christmas from Iron Languages and DLR

Tomorrow may be Thanksgiving, but the Microsoft DevDiv dynamic language teams are trying to make it feel like Christmas with three separate pre-holiday releases.

1. IronPython 2.0 RC2 
   We were really hoping to only have one release candidate, but we ended up with a couple of significant bugs that we couldn’t push off to 2.0.1. With December holidays coming soon, RC2 has a pretty small window before we declare RTM so now is the time to download the release and try your code out.
2. IronRuby 1.0 Alpha 2 
   There’s been zero blog traffic on this, just a notice on the IronRuby mailing list. As per said notice, “Notable features” include “the inclusion of iirb.bat, igem.bat, irails.bat, irake.bat”.
3. New DLR CodePlex Project T
   he DLR source has been available as part of IronPython for over a year but now they have their own home on CodePlex. Check out the Release Notes for an overview, reads some Docs and Specs or just download their initial v0.9 beta. Their v0.9 beta is synced with IPy 2.0 RC2 (and their v0.9 final will sync with IPy 2.0 RTM) but it also includes synced versions of IronRuby and ToyScript in both source and binaries. Plus, Sesh has promised “weekly code drops”. Finally, unlike IronPython and IronRuby, DLR is using the discussion section of their CodePlex site – I’m eager to see how well the new-ish discussion/mailing list integration works.

So there you go, new versions of IronPython and IronRuby plus a whole new DLR CodePlex project to boot. Enjoy.