I've previously (with IronRuby versions 0.5,0.6 and earlier nightlies) tried to do various tasks using IronRuby, for 3 reasons: 1. Because ruby is a great language and I want to use it. 2. I believe IronRuby is especially valuable for fitting in with all the .NET 'business code' around, and I hope any feedback I can provide might be useful to you? 3. To promote IronRuby amongst my company and local community
However, I'd always come up against unfixable blockers, and had to abandon the effort. With 0.9 however, I've actually succeeded, and have built an automated-integration-testing setup (testing production code on dedicated machines) using IronRuby. I'd like to offer some feedback based on this: * First of all, congratulations on all the progress! Being able to actually use IronRuby on a real project has been really satisfying. You guys are awesome! * The main issue I now have with IronRuby at the moment is startup time. It takes around 4 seconds warm-starting iirb on my core2quad with 4 gigs of RAM, and far far longer (some 30-odd seconds) cold starting on a lesser machine. I've ngen'ed all the IronRuby dll's on both machines. Anything you could do to reduce this time would make a *huge *impact (really, I'd be over the moon), and I'd gladly trade off a bit of runtime speed if it was needed. * It also feels like parsing files (require 'blah.rb', or requiring lots of files) is a slow operation. I don't have any objective data to back this up, but it seems to fit, given that warm-starting just ir.exe takes approx 0.5 seconds instead of 4 * On the plus side, being able to just distribute the 5 core dll's and omit the ruby standard library if needed is really great. One of the best things about IronRuby thus far has been that all I need to do to deploy it is copy a few files and presto. * I'm primarily using it for scripting rather than any actual computation so I'm not compute-bound, but my impression has been that the current runtime-performance of IronRuby is great (the problem is "solved" as far as I'm concerned) As an aside: the win32 console is atrocious (which negatively impacts irb greatly). Please could someone at microsoft take a mac, run terminal.app, and go and beat the windows team over the head with it. You could substitute any linux distro for the mac if you don't have one. To be clear, I don't mean powershell vs cmd.exe, I mean the actual display/renderer, which looks like it hasn't changed since windows 3.1, and can't even copy/paste a multi-line block of text properly! Thanks for all the hard work, keep it up! Orion
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