Silverlight and the Dynamic Language Runtime

I was talking to my new teammate, the honorable Dr. Andrew Sithers (not sure if he honorable or not, but thought it sounded good), about Silverlight and it's ability to harness the power of dynamic languages inside Silverlight 1.1 (the one with .NET in it!).

His question was "does the 1.1 release just have the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) in it and where does the CLR fit in?" and another question I had from a customer was "is the DLR available outside of Silverlight?".

John Lam has a great post clearing the air on the Dynamic Language Runtime. He clarifies a lot of points and thankfully the two questions I had been asked, he answered:

"The DLR requires the CLR. So this means that it only works with the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha that was released at MIX, and not the Silverlight 1.0 Beta."

"The DLR will also run on top of the desktop CLR V2.0, not just the Silverlight CLR. We have a generic hosting API that lets us retarget the DLR to run on top of arbitrary hosts. Silverlight is only one such host."

To get started with dynamic languages and Silverlight 1.1 download the DLR Console and the dynamic languages quickstart

Technorati tags: silverlight, dlr, ironpython, python