No Iron Anything
Looks like dynamic languages on the .NET platform are dead - oh, wait, they are "out in the community" now. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for much VM support though :)
Microsoft has officially ended a half-decade flirtation with building its own .NETized scripting languages, and it lost a languages guru to Google in the process. The company has handed code and project responsibility for IronRuby and IronPython to "the community," six years after it started the projects and then stuck them in limbo.
The guri reference is to Jim Hugunin, who is on his way to Google. Since Android is heavily Java dependent, and Oracle is trying to throw sand in Google's gears there, who knows what that means for dynamic languages on the JVM. My guess: nothing good.
Technorati Tags: dynamic language
Comments
Re: No Iron Anything
[David Mitchell] October 22, 2010 14:59:10.823
I bet the Google move has more to do with Python than Java. Google uses both heavily.
Re: No Iron Anything
[W^L+] October 23, 2010 12:31:14.529
With SCOracle's moves essentially killing Apache Harmony, users of Gcj and similar open source Java-based products are also on notice.
Personally, I think Oracle's moves threaten users of any other languages that use the JVM or javac, even if (as in Android's case) it is only an intermediate step. Jython, and JRuby, etc, should be looking at working with either Parrot or Squeak / Pharo for the underlying VM technology until and unless these patent claims are completely squashed.
Re: No Iron Anything
[murphee] October 24, 2010 17:27:20.613
I don't get the connection to Java & dynamic languages on the JVM.
JRuby is backed by EngineYard (they employ 3 members of the JRuby team), so they're fine.
Languages like Groovy are part of the big Enterprise cash (SpringSource, owned by VMWare backs it).
Clojure and Scala (the latter ain't dynamic of course), do perfectly fine by compiling to Java bytecode; they don't need any help or approval from Oracle.
Also - JVM languages on Android are useless; the Dalvik VM is way to inefficient to allow to do anything useful with JVM languages (that ain't helped by Android running on CPUs that are in whole different category than desktop/server CPUs). Dynamic languages on mobile platforms like Android should just use the native versions which are much more efficient. And they _are_ used; Squeak, Ruby (in the Rhodes framework), Lua for games,...