Microsoft's Dynamic Languages Runtime (DLR)

[Pascal Costanza]

Fuzzyman wrote:
> On May 2, 8:20 pm, Pascal Costanza <p... at p-cos.net> wrote:
>> sturlamolden wrote:
>>> On Monday Microsoft announced a new runtime for dynamic languages,
>>> which they call "DLR". It sits on top of the conventional .NET runtime
>>> (CLR)  and provides services for dynamically typed languages like
>>> Python or Lisp (thus the cross-posting). Apparently is is distributed
>>> under a BSD-like open-source license.
>>> I am curious to know how it performs in comparison to CPython and an
>>> efficient compiled Lisp like CMUCL. Speed is a major problem with
>>> CPython but not with .NET or CMUCL, so it will be interesting to see
>>> how the DLR performs in comparison. It would be great to finally see a
>>> Python that runs on steroids, but knowing M$ bloatware my expectations
>>> are not too high.
>>> Has anyone looked at the DLR yet? What are your impression?
>> So far, there is not a lot of information available. The only statement
>> about the technology I have read so far is that the DLR is a thin layer
>> on top of the CLR. This doesn't say a lot.
>>
>> So it's hard to tell whether this is a (good) marketing stunt or whether
>> there are actual substantial improvement to the infrastructure.
> 
> Well, they're now implementing four dynamic languages on top of the
> DLR - not just IronPython.
> 
> * IronPython
> * IronRuby
> * Java Script
> * VBx (a dynamic version of VB)
> 
> The DLR provides a dynamic type system and hosting environment for
> dynamic languages.
> 
> The nice part is that the DLR runs on top of the 'Core CLR' which
> ships with Silverlight. This means that apps. that run in Silverlight
> are secure - so you can run an IronPython console in the browser...

That still doesn't explain what DLR actually does. You can implement 
these languages on top of the JVM as well. You could implement them on 
any Turing-complete language, for that matter. The interesting question 
how well integrated such an implementation is.

However, Jim Hugunin seems to be willing to give more details on his 
blog - the recent entry gives hints that there is indeed something 
interesting going on. I'm still waiting for the meat, though...


Pascal

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