The CLR (Common Language Runtime) has good support for dynamic languages today. IronPython-1.0 demonstrates this. The new Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR (Dynamic Langauge Runtime)) adds a small set of key features to the CLR to make it dramatically better. It adds to the platform a set of services designed explicitly for the needs of dynamic languages. These include a shared dynamic type system, standard hosting model and support to make it easy to generate fast dynamic code. With these additional features it becomes dramatically easier to build high quality dynamic language implementations on .NET. More importantly, these features enable all of the dynamic languages which use the DLR to freely share code with other dynamic languages as well as with the existing powerful static languages on the platform such as VB.NET and C#.
Via Lemon Odor [1], “Dynamic Languages on .NET—IronPython and Beyond [2]”
(This post is in reference to “Polyglut [3]” and “Polyglut redux [4]”). My only comment to this news is, “How long will Microsoft hype this, and when will they then pull the rug out from everybody?”
I only mention this because of MFC (Microsoft Foundation Class Library) [5], OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) [6], COM (Component Object Model) [7] and DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) [8], just a few of the heavily hyped but long since dropped and unsupported technologies Microsoft developed over the years.
[1] http://lemonodor.com/archives/001503.html
[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/hugunin/archive/2007/04/30/a-dynamic-language-runtime-dlr.aspx
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Foundation_Class_Library
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_object_model
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Component_Object_Model