[Mono-list] Re: Is Objective-C support possible?

[Martin Coxall]

> If the CLR (I know little of the CLR yet..) doesn't support this kind of
> behaviour then dynamic languages such as Ruby will have a hard time
> socializing in the .NET framework - or have I gotten something wrong?

Active State have managed to produce a Perl compiler for the CLR, and
are working on Python, IIRC. And indeed, Perl 6 is a dynamically typed
language that will have its own simple VM, Parrot. So, not neceassarily.

In fact, any turing-complete language is theoretically able to be
compiled to IL, just some more efficiently than others.

> As you might have suspected I am interested in a Ruby.NET - could anyone
> comment on things that would be problematic for such a project or why it would
> be feasible?

As IL is a simple, stack-based language, as with Objective C, you will
have to use reflection to dynamically add methods to an object. In which
case, performance will be your biggest enemy. As for the amount of
overhead from using a dynamically typed language with the CLR, the best
way will be to try it and see.

Martin