Is IronRuby Dead?

Question

I am .Net programmer who is looking to branch out and possibly use some Ruby in my current and future web applications. Looking on the Iron Ruby Website the last release was nearly a year ago: March 13, 2011. No announcements have have been made on their website since that time either.

With all of this, a several questions come to mind:

1. Is IronRuby Dead?
2. If the project is dead, are there any alternatives that are integrated in .Net?
3. If it's alive, is it still an actively maintained project? Where can I find the most recent release?
4. Am I barking up the wrong tree? Should I leave ruby as just ruby and .Net as .Net, two separate entities never to meet in the same project?

I've seen questions regarding IronRuby on stackoverflow recently, so obviously folks are using it. I'm not sure if they're supporting legacy applications or doing new development work.

Answer 1

Pro-tip: developers hate making announcements. We're antisocial creatures. IronRuby was last committed to 5 days ago (as of the time of this post). So it's very much alive.

https://github.com/IronLanguages/main/tree/master/Languages/Ruby

Answer 2

I think the number of people who are actively working on a project (actually submitting patches) is directly related to how useful that project is to the community. Unfortunately, in the year since the project disconnected from Microsoft, there hasn't been a huge influx of people wanting to work on IronRuby. Either that means it's not important to the .NET community at large, or the .NET community rather use it than help build it. Either way, development has definitely slowed; Tomas and I have other full-time jobs, and no one else has really stepped up, so the current pace is of development is what we foresee. Unless of course this motivates people. :)

If IronRuby doesn't work for you, please submit an issue or a pull request on GitHub. Pull requests preferred.