Bringing dynamic languages to .NET with the DLR

Abstract

From the beginning, Microsoft's .NET framework was designed to support a broad range of different programming languages on a Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CLR provides shared services to these languages ranging from a world-class GC and JIT to a sandboxed security model to tools integration for debugging and profiling. Sharing these features has two huge benefits for languages on the CLR. First, it's easier to implement a language because lots of difficult engineering work is already done for you. Second, and more importantly, these languages can seamlessly work together and share libraries and frameworks so that each language can build on the work of the others. The CLR has good support for dynamic languages today. IronPython-1.0 demonstrates this. The new Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) adds a small set of key features to the CLR to make it dramatically better. It adds to the platform a set of services designed explicitly for the needs of dynamic languages. These include a shared dynamic type system, standard hosting model and support to make it easy to generate fast dynamic code. With these additional features it becomes dramatically easier to build high-quality dynamic language implementations on .NET. More importantly, these features enable all of the dynamic languages which use the DLR to freely share code with other dynamic languages as well as with the existing powerful static languages on the platform such as VB.NET and C#.