Getting started with IronRuby

Steve Eichert — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 02:44:25 GMT

Tonight I was chatting a bit with a co-worker about IronPython and IronRuby and decided to have a look at IronRuby. Getting started is supposed to be pretty easy.

1. Checkout the IronRuby source from RubyForge

svn co svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/ironruby

2. Install Ruby via the Ruby 1-click installer: http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyinstaller/
3. Open a Visual Studio Command Prompt
4. Install the pathname2 gem by running the following from the command line:

gem install pathname2

5. Compile IronRuby by running:

rake compile

Unfortunately when running "rake compile" I get the following errors.

C:\Development\ironruby\trunk>rake compile
(in C:/Development/ironruby/trunk)
Read in 17 resources from "C:\Development\ironruby\trunk\src\microsoft.scripting
\Math\MathResources.resx"
Writing resource file... Done.
Read in 49 resources from "C:\Development\ironruby\trunk\src\microsoft.scripting
\Resources.resx"
Writing resource file... Done.
rake aborted!
Command failed with status (0): [csc /nologo /noconfig /nowarn:1591,1701,17...]
C:/Development/ironruby/trunk/rakefile:197:in `exec'
(See full trace by running task with --trace)

I did a little digging around to see if I could find out what was causing the above problem but didn't uncover anything. In hopes of making some progress and seeing ruby running on top of the CLR, I decided to try and compile using the IronRuby VS.NET solution file. Compiling IronRuby using the VS.NET solution file built everything into the \bin\debug folder. Once that was done I was able to run rbx.exe and do a little experimentation. rbx didn't behave like I expected and seemed to be acting pretty flaky but I was able to put in some simple Ruby expressions and see the results I expected. Now that I have the source downloaded and compiled I'm going to dig into things a bit more to see where things stand.

Some resources that I came across that might be useful to others include:

The Dynamic Language Runtime on Mono

Steve Eichert — Wed, 16 May 2007 13:07:36 GMT

When I heard that the Dynamic Language Runtime was going to be open source, and subsequently heard some things that Miguel said about it I knew it was only a matter of time before DLR support was added to Mono. It sounds like only 15 days after the announcement of the DLR it's already made its way to Mono. As M. David Peterson points out, it still has a ways to go but it's promosing to see them making such good progress so soon!

Steve Eichert - dlr

Getting started with IronRuby

The Dynamic Language Runtime on Mono