Unfortunately after using IronRuby at work a bit, I've found that there are still a few too many bugs with the thing for me to want to depend on it for production software. The bugs are already reported, however they are tagged as low priority and will not likely be fixed any time soon. Rather than spending lots of time fixing the bugs myself (I get paid to make profit, not to work on open-source pet projects), I'll just continue doing things the way that I have been!
Hopefully someone else will find IronRuby useful!
In case you're wondering, the bug that really killed it for me was the inability to use gems with RVM under Linux. The following command fails with issues installing RubyGems:
rvm install ironruby
No Rubygems drastically reduces the usefulness of Ruby, enough that I'm not really wanting to use it anymore.
7 comments:
Mmmmmmm is it just me, but it seems a bit weird to use IronRuby on Linux, no? The biggest or sole advantage to use Ironruby would be direct/native access to the .NET libraries. So I think most of the developers using Ironruby will be focusing on Windows.
Why on earth would you want to use IronRuby on Linux?
It's because our existing software is in .NET, but I'd prefer to work under Ubuntu. So it's preferable to get as much of the software working under Ubuntu as possible so that I'm not constantly working in a virtual machine.
ironruby on linux is not likely to have a lot of users, so unless you are willing to contribute code you shouldn't bother. also this is more an affirmation of the "scratch your own itch" philosophy of F/OSS than an indictment of ironruby. linux is likely to never be a popular platform for ironruby, for obvious reasons.
RVM doesn't really support IronRuby since no one has expressed enough interest in it for Wayne to keep it updated.
It's been broken for months.
IronRuby has continually changed its project structure and build process, making it difficult for RVM to keep up. RVM likes to build the rubies, and this has made building IronRuby very difficult. I've worked with Wayne previously to get IronRuby 1.0 building, and he is very willing to support IronRuby in the future if someone will work with him.
I'd like to see RVM just install the binary files instead of building from source, until the project structure and build process are a bit more stable. I encourage you to hop on the #rvm IRC channel and help.
– Why to use IronRuby on Linux? Because Mono (http://www.mono-project.com/).
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