MIX07: More Dynamic Language Runtime

Just came from the talk with John Lam and Jim Hugunin. Wild talk. They had, with the DLR in Silverlight, several languages mixed in a single application. What strikes me as interesting is the shear power you’ll have with the DLR in cut-n-code prototyping work; you can grab an existing 3D engine in JavaScript and mash it up with your Ruby code that handles an HTML button click from the hosting page, etc. The possibilities and combinations are staggering…

The demo code including a nifty “try it out” / IRB-style console is available at CodePlex, right here.

Fact: The DLR can be hosted outside of Silverlight. I suspected but this is the first time I heard this explicitly. In retrospect it makes sense as IronPython runs all over the place. Allegedly there was a demo earlier (didn’t see it) that demonstrated running dynamic languages in an ASP.NET application.

The performance is quite amazing for languages running on the DLR. For example, IronPython’s performance already exceeds that of the ”official” Python implementation. I wonder if this is the solution to Rails performance issues… assuming, of course, you can/will swallow the licensing pill.

The Ruby implementation isn’t 100%. It’s coming, the check’s in the mail.