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Several years ago, Microsoft announced that Ruby and Python were coming to .net. The projects were called IronRuby and IronPython, respectively. Microsoft said that the projects would be built on top of the .net DLR.

WIKIpedia indicates that for all intents and purposes, these projects have been abandoned by Microsoft.

Why did Microsoft abandon these projects?

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  • 4
    They were never maintained by Microsoft. Visual Studio support still exists in Visual Studio 2013.
    – Ramhound
    Sep 13, 2013 at 16:20
  • The IronPython project is still going strong, whereas IronRuby is effectively dead. Why Microsoft cast them off into the open source community has never been answered in a public forum, but you can speculate that the general developer at Microsoft and people using their development platforms were more interested C# and C++. It was probably not profitable to support stuff like IronRuby and IronPython because it had little traction in the world at large, and ultimately Microsoft cares about people using their tools and platform, and they support the technologies people care about.
    – wkl
    Sep 13, 2013 at 16:21
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    @Ramhound - in their infancy, both IronRuby and IronPython were started inside Microsoft. I also went to school with one of the project leaders (who became a coordinator of both projects after the projects were released under open source licenses).
    – wkl
    Sep 13, 2013 at 16:23
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    When .NET was created, Microsoft made a big fuss about it being able to support virtually any language. I got the impression projects like IronPython and IronRuby were meant to (1) test the .NET design to make sure it really could handle them, and (2) prove the value of .NET to developers and the marketplace. Once .NET was established, I assume releasing those projects into the wild and allowing them to succeed or fail on their own merits made a lot of sense.
    – user8709
    Sep 13, 2013 at 17:04
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    @mattnz There is an objective answer explained in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Language_Runtime - the DLR project turned out to be unfit for other languages. Sep 9, 2015 at 18:41

1 Answer 1

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They are open source and not made by MS. IronPython is still in existence, built in .NET and under active development, however, only for Python 2.7, not 3.3 (yet?). A fresh version was released a few days ago. I don't know about IronRuby.

Additionally, in combination with Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS), you can use Visual Studio for IronPython development.

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  • It would also seem that Python Tools are "built in" with Visual Studio 2013. I watched a video from PyTools where they have VS2013, go to New Project, choose Python, and you get an option to download the tools automatically from the IDE, then next time you choose New Project and go to Python, you get all the options for your Python Project, even Django.
    – Musaab
    Sep 13, 2013 at 17:33
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    -1: untrue. IronPython was made by Jim Hugunin as part of his work for M$. Sep 9, 2015 at 18:46

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