Dynamic Languages on the CLR

By Michael Foord -
For those of you who may have only recently realised that there are several dynamic languages that run on the Common Language Runtime, this article by Robert Sundstrom gives a nice overview. It covers the Dynamic Language Runtime (along with its two main languages IronPython and IronRuby) plus Silverlight. It also includes details of Phalanger, a .NET implementation of PHP that started as a students project at a Czech university and doesn't *yet* use the DLR.
"There are a lot of compilers out there and the number is increasing. This has been very interesting in the last few years because of the development frameworks, which has removed the borders between machine architectures. One of those frameworks is the .NET framework, which is Microsofts own competitor to other frameworks like the Java Platform. The .NET framework was designed to support multiple languages and let them co-exist as equal languages on the same platform sharing the same class and runtime library. There has been a lot of talk about dynamic languages on the CLR (the runtime engine of the .NET framework)."

UPDATE: One of the original Phalanger devs was Tomas Matousek who is now one of the main IronRuby developers. (Thanks to Curt Hagenlocher.)

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