In praise of IronRuby’s Source Code

In my previous post about IronRuby, I expressed optimism while pointing out issues with the first pre-alpha release. Just as John Lam acknowledged, this is indeed a very promising start. My post received two great responses: a patch for all the problems that I pointed out and even a tutorial on how to approach the hacking of IronRuby’s source code.

I knew, or at least I hoped, that this would happen. When I hit the publish button, I was almost certain that someone would come up with a patch in an hour or so. This is a testimonial to the power of open source software. In this case though, something more was shown: the power of open source when your source code is damn good. IronRuby’s code is clearly elegant and extremely easy to change and extend. I rarely say this, but I’m highly impressed by the quality and clarity of IronRuby’s code. Pretty much anyone can amend the code for the bugs I pointed out, all you need to know is some basic C# syntax and the concept of method overload.

I’ve known C# since its first appearance (2001) and I usually consider it rather verbose, but IronRuby shows what good C# code is all about. I’d argue that the same issues wouldn’t have been fixed so easily or quickly if the code was cryptic or if this was the main C implementation of Ruby. So what can we expect when the project hits RubyForge? A lot of participation and very rapid progress because the barriers of entry are very low. We’ll need plenty of test cases, a decent road map and good leadership, but I see this project excelling and progressing at a fast pace.

I sincerely hope that Microsoft won’t “embrace, extend, extinguish” this one, because it would be a shame. So far, starting from hiring John, all the way up to the decisions regarding distribution of the code and contributions, Microsoft has nailed it.