Which implementation of Ruby will survive?

Question

From what I've heard there was IronRuby and Ruby.NET and a few other variations. I've also heard that Ruby may not be supported anymore by Microsoft as they started to lay of much of that development group.

I'd like to know which implementation(s) of Ruby is likely to survive, and which one will be adopted into large enterprises.

It would also be nice know if the adoption into enterprises is likely to be limited to a certain industry (finance, technology, education) Business type (start up, enterprise) or platform (windows, mac, linux, other-nix)

Answer 1

Most likely - they will never get adopted into large enterprises. At least - those languages that are built on top of DLR.

Thing is - these languages got quite small niche. They are best choice only when there's need for strong interop between ruby and .NET. Otherwise - it's usually better to go pure .NET or pure ruby.

Ruby (one that is not on top of DLR) itself still can't get into large enterprises (check job offerings).

I suspect that eventually it (Iron ruby) will die just like J# did (at least I can't call it alive).

<irony>But we don't need no stinkin ruby, we got LightSwitch!</irony>

Answer 2

IronRuby is the only implementation of Ruby in the .NET space - the Ruby.Net was incorporated into the Microsoft project a long time ago.

As for the other questions, a lot of other people would be interested to know the answers too! Sadly, there's nobody to give an authoritative answer.

We can be pretty sure that Matz' Ruby (commonly identified as "MRI") will continue to exist, though. Beyond that it's not clear. I'd expect that JRuby would be next most likely to be a long-term survivor as a version that stays up-to-date and in development. Others? I'm as curious as the original questioner.

It's safe to say that adoption is fairly widespread in both business areas and technical platforms, but with a bias toward the OSX/web-app mix, since Rails is a big driver of adoption and much Rails developers are Mac people.