Herding Code 146 – Shay Friedman on Roslyn, IronRuby and the DLR

While at NDC 2012 in Oslo, Jon and K. Scott talked to Shay Friedman about Roslyn, IronRuby, and the DLR.

Download / Listen:

Herding Code 146 – Shay Friedman on Roslyn, IronRuby, and the DLR [audio://herdingcode.com/wp-content/uploads/HerdingCode-0146-Shay-Friedman.mp3]

Show Notes:

  • K. Scott asks Shay about the what he covered in his "What? C# Could Do That?" talk. Shay mentions dynamic capabilities, the DLR, and Roslyn.
  • K. Scott asks Shay to explain Roslyn. Shay explains how Roslyn works as a very configurable compiler and talks about how his demonstration showed creating a new language keyword.
  • Jon asks if it’s possible to build out significant parts of a language with Roslyn. Shay says you’d really use it to extend C# – but there’s more to it than that. He talks about CSX (scripting with C#), C# REPL, and changes to the IDE experience that are now available due to having a much better compiler.
  • K. Scott asks if it’s shipping in Visual Studio 2012. Shay says that it’s a CTP, but it’s avialable for both Visual Studio 2010 and 2012.
  • Jon asks for Shay to talk more about metaprogramming. Shay explains more about what could be done with this – for instance, an ORM could could add in specialized language support.
  • K. Scott asks about the state of IronRuby. Shay says that it’s still active, it’s ignored by the Ruby community, but it has a lot of great applications – for instance, allowing users to write simple business rules in Ruby, and loading Ruby Gems in .NET applications.
  • Jon asks if Shay uses the DLR separately from IronRuby and IronPython. Shay mentions some examples like IronJS, Scheme, LUA and LOLCODE. The DLR is built into .NET framework, so it’s not going anywhere.
  • Jon asks about how dynamic objects function differently than other C# objects. Shay explains it’s basically an object, but it’s all executed at runtime.

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