[ANN] Garden's Point Ruby.NET compiler 0.8 beta released

Hi All

Since I see no mention of this on the list, below is the announcement I
received from Dr. Wayne Kelly.
This version includes an Interop prototype, so you can compile a Ruby
program to a DLL, include that
DLL in a C# program, and use the classes!

The link to the website below has some screen shots which were enough for me
to figure out how to use
the Interop, with these additional steps:

1. I needed to compile the Ruby program on the command line like so:
D:\RubyIntegration\Person>"C:\Program Files\Ruby.NET\bin\rubycompiler"
/target:library Person.rb

2. I needed to include the resulting Person.dll into the C# project.

3. I needed to include the QUT.RubyRuntime dll in the C# project too, and
it's installed in a strange location:
C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\QUT.RubyRuntime\0.8.0.0__834595ca8023c318\QUT.RubyRuntime.dll

Les

-----------------------------------------------------------------------snip-----------------------------------------------------------------------

We are pleased to announce the release of a new Beta (version 0.8) of the
Gardens Point Ruby.NET compiler. Since the last release we have added
support for interoperability with other .NET languages, so that components
developed using other .NET languages can conveniently use classes
implemented using Ruby.NET and vice versa. Please see our home page:

http://plas2003.fit.qut.edu.au/Ruby.NET/

to download installers, full source code or for further details.

This first prototype has a number of limitations with respect to
interoperability, including:

  1. Ruby programs can only call methods implemented in other
     languages where the parameters are passed by value
     (ie, we don't yet support calling methods that include
      ref or out parameters).

  2. Non-Ruby programs can only conveniently make use of Ruby
     classes that have no explicit parent class (ie we don't
     yet support interop if the Ruby class inherits from
     something other than Object).

We will address these and other interoperability issues in our next release
and hope to demonstrate development of Forms applications using Ruby.NET in
our next release.

Our work on porting Ruby on Rails is progressing well, but is not yet ready
for public release.

We still haven't yet performed any optimization on the code we generate.

We will soon be moving to a more traditional open source model of community
contribution to our code base and will be calling for volunteer developers.
If anyone has any experience in managing that kind of process, we'd be
interested in your input.

You are also welcome to submit bug reports to w.kelly@qut.edu.au - please
submit a minimal self-contained Ruby snippet that illustrates the bug.

Cheers, Wayne.

(for the Ruby.NET team)

···

________________________________

Dr Wayne Kelly Senior Lecturer
Email: w.kelly@qut.edu.au School of Software Engineering and DC
Phone: +61 7 3864 9336 Faculty of Information Technology
Fax: +61 7 3864 9390 Queensland University of Technology

--
I always thought Smalltalk would beat Java, I just didn't know it would be
called 'Ruby' when it did.
-- Kent Beck