[Ironruby-core] Implementation plan and a string question...

[John Lam (DLR)]

Lee Culver:

> Is there a plan in place as to which features currently have the
> highest priority for implementation, and if so what is the priority of
> reflection?  IMO, reflection methods should probably be a moderately
> high priority, as this would help with implementing most other
> features.
> For example, I was trying to see what string functions were missing
> from the implementation from within the IronRuby interpreter, but got
> an error when trying to get the methods for strings...  Of course I can
> pull up the source (and did), but I think implementing some of these
> things would be easier with reflection in place.  Just a suggestion...

As we refactor stuff after our RubyConf hacks, we're adding the method reflection methods. This should show up either early next week when we resync our tree with SVN.

> My second question is related to strings...  You are currently
> StringBuilder to implement your MutableString class, though there is a
> comment about eventually replacing this with byte[].  Is there any ETA
> on when that might happen?  I had wanted to work on implementing some
> of the string functions to get myself acquainted with the codebase,
> but I see that the string class is in a state where it might not be
> the best of ideas to try to add new functionality...  Or, if you are
> willing to accept a patch for it, I may try the StringBuilder ->
> byte[] conversion myself.

If you want to try the byte[] conversion, please go for it. You could also take the approach of implementing additional instance methods on String since the interface to StringBuilder should be mostly compatible.

> Lastly, I see the following in the code base: /*!*/.  For example:
>
>         public MutableString/*!*/ Append(string/*!*/ str, int
> startIndex, int charCount) {
>

These are the Spec# annotations. There is a wiki with some info on Spec#:

http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/SpecSharp.HomePage
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/SpecSharp.SpecSharpAttributes

Research papers are available on http://research.microsoft.com/specsharp.

Thanks,
-John