Is IronRuby Dead?

Question

I am .Net programmer who is looking to branch out and possibly use some Ruby in my current and future web applications. Looking on the Iron Ruby Website the last release was nearly a year ago: March 13, 2011. No announcements have have been made on their website since that time either.

With all of this, a several questions come to mind:

1. Is IronRuby Dead?
2. If the project is dead, are there any alternatives that are integrated in .Net?
3. If it's alive, is it still an actively maintained project? Where can I find the most recent release?
4. Am I barking up the wrong tree? Should I leave ruby as just ruby and .Net as .Net, two separate entities never to meet in the same project?

I've seen questions regarding IronRuby on stackoverflow recently, so obviously folks are using it. I'm not sure if they're supporting legacy applications or doing new development work.

Caundra

IronRuby and IronPython were transitioned over to the community for development a little over a year ago by Microsoft. It's not dead, just hasn't seen a release in a while. Other languages of varying similarity are Scala, Clojure, and F# (which is directly supported by Microsoft). – Edin

Answer 1

Pro-tip: developers hate making announcements. We're antisocial creatures. IronRuby was last committed to 5 days ago (as of the time of this post). So it's very much alive.

https://github.com/IronLanguages/main/tree/master/Languages/Ruby

Blackbeard

@Chris-IronPython was committed 5 days ago, Looks like IronRuby was committed a little over a month ago (at the time of this comment). I searched for IronRuby on github before posting this and found this: github.com/IronLanguages/ironruby-contrib which lead me to believe it was dead/dying – Caundra

@TheSavage I didn't realize that it hosted other languages. This was the official link on the website. The items under the ruby directory indicate activity within the past month, so I'd still say it's active. – Blackbeard

@TheSavage plus it's got pending pull requests for IronRuby which tells me people are still trying to improve it. – Blackbeard

github.com/IronLanguages/ironruby-contrib was just a project for community projects that are related to IronRuby. The actual project is github.com/IronLanguages/main (yes, I know "main" as a repo name is a bit strange, but that's what it is currently). – Encomiast

The site, ironruby.net, doesn't seem to be available, but I'm having issues finding a how-to, or tutorial on IronRuby, or what the differences are between Ruby and IronRuby. – Aleenaleetha

@Pred the difference is that IronRuby runs on the .NET CLR, whereas normal Ruby runs on its own C-based interpreter. IronRuby can use other libraries written in .NET-compatible languages (C#, VB, Managed C++, etc) but it can't use normal ruby Gems. The regular Ruby interpreter uses ruby Gems, but can't use .NET libraries. – Blackbeard

@Chris, So all the normal functionality of Ruby would be the same, and just like you said, no gems, but I could use the .NET libraries? – Aleenaleetha

@Pred correct. The maintainers try to keep the core library (builtin functions) consistent. And yes you can use .NET libraries. – Blackbeard

I think we can now announce IronRuby as being dead. RIP. (It's a shame) – Lawn

@dbarros 3 months = dead? Really? – Blackbeard

@chris last release was 2011? According to its website. Where are you looking? – Lawn

@dbarros I'm looking at their git repo. Same as indicated in my actual answer. At the time of this comment, the last commit was 5 months ago, and the last commit to the Ruby directory was 9 months ago. – Blackbeard

Answer 2

I think the number of people who are actively working on a project (actually submitting patches) is directly related to how useful that project is to the community. Unfortunately, in the year since the project disconnected from Microsoft, there hasn't been a huge influx of people wanting to work on IronRuby. Either that means it's not important to the .NET community at large, or the .NET community rather use it than help build it. Either way, development has definitely slowed; Tomas and I have other full-time jobs, and no one else has really stepped up, so the current pace is of development is what we foresee. Unless of course this motivates people. :)

If IronRuby doesn't work for you, please submit an issue or a pull request on GitHub. Pull requests preferred.

Encomiast

Bummer... It's probably because the .NET development community as a whole is much less active in open source than, say, the Ruby or Python communities. – Misgiving

From my experience only a relatively small subset of .NET developers bother to look beyond what comes bundled with Visual Studio. – Pronominal

Answer 3

As for question 1: http://evain.net/blog/articles/2010/08/07/on-ironruby

"The good news is that the code of IronPython, IronRuby and the DLR is open source, and has recently been re-licensed under the Apache2 license. The official message is that IronRuby’s fate is now in the hands of the community."

So yes, it's abandomed by the developers. However the community keeps it 'alive'.

As for 2 and 3 I cannot really answer that but for 4: I wouldn't see any problems as long as the two won't interfere with each other. Developing in multiple languages is nothing new nowadays. but choose wisely what you will use. Always try to compare things against your needs and preferences.

Update: I see the poster above/under me (lol?) found a link that it's still alive. Nice to see it is. Didn't notice that!

Slurry

See also blog.jimmy.schementi.com/2010/08/… – Accomplice

Answer 4

It looks like so, we are in the end of 2014 and the work seems to be halted.

The package in NuGet is from 2011, Ruby moved forward into 2.0+ and they did not showed any new progress, commit, try, anything. Somebody even moved it to Github, but that was pretty much it, nothing was done.

So it's pretty much dead for now, maybe some ambitious future incoming for Ruby 2 or 3, but I pretty much doubt it seeing how BIG Dynamic, CLR and Roslyn are growing I can understand why they lost so much space in programmers agenda.

Not to mention F# future.

Edit: Another thing that changed from the time the answers were made is: MS dumped Iron languages to the community.

Edit2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IronRuby Cited as Abandonware.

Iminourea

Answer 5

For Python, there's the just released Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS). It's pretty solid, and seems a worthy successor to IronPython.

Hopefully Microsoft will invest on a similar version for Ruby in the near future.

Hyperboloid

While interesting and worthwhile, this is not really a replacement for IronPython, but "merely" and editor. The point of IronPython and IronRuby is that they run on the .Net CLR, which makes them useful as "glue languages" to pull together random .net components. I don't know whether there are any real replacements. PowerShell, maybe? – Impute

Answer 6

Last time I checked (now, Feb 2020) https://github.com/IronLanguages/main/tree/master/Languages/Ruby

Lastest commit is:

Latest commit fac0782 on 4 Jul 2016

and here's a banner:

This repository has been archived by the owner. It is now read-only.

and there is no mention on the main readme.txt about changing mantainers or moving the repo anywhere.

Also, latest news on http://ironruby.net/announcements/ are still from 2011.

I'd say, dead as a doornail

Vintner