Wow, big news to start off my new blog. The Gardens Point GP Ruby .NET development team has announced an initial beta version of their system.

At this point, they claim that it can compile Ruby source into verifiable .Net v2.0 assembly, or it can run Ruby code directly in a compile, load and execute cycle. They do warn that their implementation is not yet complete, although it does pass everything in samples/test.rb (I wonder if they're using the Rubicon/Rubytests stuff for further testing?).

Source code for their this release is available here. This software is being released as free software, so there should be ample opportunity to work with other development groups.

All this prompts an interesting set of questions though:

• There are now several groups working on Ruby implementations (JRuby, YARV, metaruby, etc.), how much of this is wasted duplication and how can the various groups help one another?
• Which of these is going to gain widespread traction in the Ruby community, and how will that affect the projects that don't?
• Some of the projects working in this space seem to suffer from the Not Invented Here syndrome, what needs to be done to better communicate the goals and progress of all these projects to the comunity to help reduce needless duplication?