RE: [Rubydotnet-developer] [ANN] Ruby/.NET bridge release 4 now available

[John R. P. <jo...@pi...>]

On Wed, 24 Sep 2003 01:02:42 +0200, "Thomas Sondergaard" wrote:

> Great! Things are moving along nicely. It's a tell tale sign that you
> are getting quite feature complete now that you can devote time to
> documentation.

This was cheaper than expected!  Our swiki lets us render itself to static HTML
pages which made this an hour project -- good thing!

> I have a couple of ideas. I think both our bridges are getting
> reasonably feature complete. I think there are two significant things
> that could contribute to both our projects and the ultimate goal the
> best possible integration with .net from ruby:

One major feature we've yet to implement is class inheritance.  We have
interface inheritance, but we'll be adding class inheritance soon. Beyond that
we have some tidying up to do (GC and performance could be a rathole for a
while).

> 1) A dogfood project - as in eating our own. A large or largish
> application written in ruby using the .net facilities. Unit tests are
> great but it would be interesting to flush out the bugs you only find
> with use and get a feel for the runtime performance etc.

Hmm, what sort of largish application could you imagine we should write?
Internally we've used the .NET bridge to build tools to make our development go
faster (e.g. source control coordination, agile development tools, etc...). Are
you thinking about building a web application (for broad acceptance)? 

We have a running joke at work about conserving GUIDs. Springing off this idea,
maybe we could develop a Web Application to "Save the Guids" using our bridges. 
Users could register an account with the site, return Guids to a master pool,
get new GUIDs when they need them, get credits for returning the ones when they
are done, have a top 100 users who conserve on GUIDs, etc....  It is crazy for
sure -- maybe too goofy, but a thought.

> 2) Contributing to ruby itself to improve it's threading on Windows. I
> have run some experiments using ruby (no .net) on Windows and linux with
> ruby threads. On linux things appear to work sanely. Take for instance
> this small script:
> 
> t = Thread.new { loop { sleep 1; puts "hello world" } }
> loop { puts gets }
> t.join
 
Gosh, we second this!  Agreed!  Why does it have to block? This needs fixed in
either Ruby or the underlying platform. Any thoughts on how to proceed?  Should
we work with the Pragmatic Programmers?  This has been quite annoying to us and
limits what we can do.

> I am also thinking about a Mono port using the mono hosting API. The
> managed C++ extension wont work on non-windows platforms and I think the
> cross platform aspect is important to the ruby community. Unix support
> in itself certainly is important to the community.

Certainly Mono is a new direction to take the bridge technology.  I fear that
the Ruby community at large might not have interest in what Microsoft is doing
-- so maybe Mono doesn't interest anyone anymore than .NET.  I don't know, but
it could be a big rathole for limited acceptance.  What do you really think?

> I have also been lobbying around the Python, Tcl and Lua camps to hear
> if they have similar projects as ours and suggested that we collaborate
> on the bits that are similar across projects. I have been sending them
> the following lines:

We certainly would love to collaborate more with other languages gurus. As you
said, much of the technology and techniques applied to Ruby/.NET are applicable
when bridging VMs.  For instance, we built a Squeak Smalltalk interface to the
backend .NET bridge real quick and easy once we understood the issues in Ruby.

I wonder if we should seriously consider joining efforts more closely before
seriously considering offering a helping hand to other language enthusiasts? The
trouble is, we both have a lot invested in what we've done and merging is never
an easy task. Maybe it doesn't matter, but I just wonder.

Regards,

John