I'm a Windows guy and a Ruby guy, so of course I was disappointed at the recent developments around Jimmy Schementi's job change and what Microsoft is doing with the IronRuby team. I want to believe what some other folks are saying about the reports of IronRuby's death being greatly exaggerated, but it still doesn't look too good to me. A few days after this buzz started going around, I started thinking about what I'm doing about it. I'm using Ruby on Windows quite a bit, and there are not a lot of us, but I'm doing all my Windows work on MRI (Matz' Ruby Interpreter). I have IronRuby installed, but I don't use it for anything but an occasional experiment.
If I really care about the future of IronRuby, I need to be a little more supportive, maybe even (dare I say it?) get involved. I recently discovered the new Iron Languages Podcast and learned that there are three (count them) IronRuby MVPs. I honestly didn't know there were any. Anyway, I got inspired to start trying to work IronRuby into my life somehow.
I am a little concerned about how compelling most not-already-Ruby-infected .NET developers will find IronRuby without any Visual Studio tooling. That makes it more of a .NET for Ruby folks than a Ruby for .NET folks. So I thought I would try using it for some of my normal Ruby stuff, the same way I might spike JRuby or Rubinius. Can I do some simple BDD with VIM, rspec, and autospec with Growl?
The first thing I did was to clean up my installation. If you don't have other versions of Ruby installed, the stock IronRuby install works just fine. They've replaced the commands ruby and gem with ir and igem, but if you install autotest or rspec or any other gem that you might call directly from the command line, you can run into conflicts if your MRI gems and your IronRuby gems are both in your path at the same time. I manually removed IronRuby from my path and added it to my pik list. Now I just use pik to choose IronRuby, and it handles the path changes for me.
By the way, if you have IronRuby installed in a directory with any spaces in the full path, it's going to cause you some trouble down the road with certain gems, so do yourself a favor and put it somewhere other than under C:\Program Files\.
I installed some of my favorite gems rspec, autotest, and autotest-growl, which all installed fine because they don't use native extensions. Then I got started on Uncle Bob's good old prime factors kata. You know what? It pretty much worked! The tests ran fine when triggered by saving files. I had a small problem with autospec's handling of Ctrl-C to force the tests to run on demand. It seemed to handle it twice, which caused it to exit, which was less than helpful. But other than that, it appeared to run just like MRI. Even my Growl notifications worked. Love me some Growl.
Now that I've got IronRuby acting like Ruby, I need to get it acting like .NET. I'll save that for another day. Stay tuned.
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