Charles Nutter and Wayne Kelly: Making Ruby Run on Static Virtual Machines - JRuby(JVM) and Ruby.NET

Posted By: Charles | Feb 11th @ 12:28 PM

At Lang.NET 2008, I caught up with two dynamic languages afficianados who have been working on a similar (and really hard)problem over the years: getting Ruby (a dynamic language) to run on a static virtual machine (JVM and CLR, respectived).

Charles Nutter is a lead developer on the JRuby project which aims to run Ruby "natively' on the JVM. Wayne Kelly is the lead developer on the now defunct Ruby.NET project (it's been merged into the IronRuby project so Wayne and team's great work has not gone with the wind...) which aimed to get Ruby to run on the CLR.

Both Charles and Wayne are challanged by the same technical hurdles: Running dynamic code in a statically-typed environment with no support for continuations. This is really challenging and is the primary reason that Microsoft created the DLR...

Here, we chat about that they're working on and what problems they face.

Another interesting discussion with brilliant people at Lang.NET 2008.

Enjoy.

Low res download file.