Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Ruby.NET Compiler Passes test.rb

Queensland University of Technology's Ruby.NET project has achieved a major milestone: their Ruby to .NET compiler is able to run and pass all the test.rb samples in the C Ruby distribution. They've got plenty more work to do to be "Ruby compatible" in any sense of the words, but they're making very good progress.

I'm going to stay involved with this project to help in any way I can, be it discussions on implementation challenges or helping to debug and write tests. The .NET CLR is an impressive piece of technology, and I'd certainly like to see Ruby gain traction in the .NET world as well.

At any rate, kudos to the QUT folks for their hard work. I'm also glad to see they have a very liberal license and all source available online. Once I confirm I won't be tainted in any way I'll be reviewing their code and compiler...I'll report back on what I find.

It's amazing what financial backing from a major software company can do for an open-source project :)