Dynamic Support for Scripting Languages

Microsoft today announced 1st class support for Dynamic Scripting Languages for the .NET Framework. That is, they're adding first-class support for dynamic languages on top of the Common Language Runtime (CLR) - they've coined it the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR).

Currently the target languages are Python, JavaScript (EcmaScript 3.0), Visual Basic and Ruby. I'm not sure if this is big P Python, or just improving the integration of IronPython.

This is important, even though it's just a Microsoft announcement for their Windows platform. The Mono project will no doubt be inspired by Silverlight to raise the bar again. Looks like we're going to get multi-language, cross-platform, client-side immersive web applications - this is AJAX++.

Links:

• Jim Huginin's announcement
• Miguel de Icaza's prophetic post
• Microsoft's Silverlight
• IronPython

| 01 May 2007 | #