DLR & X++

About a week ago Microsoft has announced the new technology named DLR. As far as I know, this is a layer for dynamic languages support on top of .NET framework. I watched the very interesting video where integration of Python, Ruby and JScript is shown.

But what can it give to Dynamics Ax?

I think X++ have some features of dynamic languages.

For example, method identification is being done via method names, not some kinds of method ids (i.e. virtual methiod table indexes like C++). If you write code like

MyClass x;
;
x.myMethod();

compiler checks that class MyClass have method myMethod, runtime checks, that object x has method myMethod, but run time does not check whether x is instance of MyClass.

So you can write something like

MyOtherClass y=...;
Object o=y;
MyClass x=o;
;
x.myMethod();

the code will be executed successfully if MyOtherClass have method myMethod, even if MyOtherClass and MyClass have no common superclass.

Such tricks are used with forms (for example ; Tabax plugin SDK is using it also to provide compiler checks for tabax service methods usage).

So if Microsoft is planning to move Dynamics Ax to .NET platform, they should provide support for such behaviour for the backward comapatibility.

I think the work being done on DLR can be used in such case. Jim Hugunin, architect of DLR and and the author of IronPython says (see video mentioned above), that this implementation of the Python language outperform original C implementation (CPython) and runs 2 times faster on standard benchmarks. He also pays extremely high attention on backwards compatibility (for example, you can not use .NET object methods in IronPython code until you place "import clr" statement in your code).

I think when this job will be done and authors of DLR will find and mitigate dynamic languages problems in DLR and SilverLight, the result of the job can be used in the future dynamics products.

PS. I played some time with IronPython and found though it have pretty good perormance in requires a lot of time to initialize an engine and load a script.