Whee ! There’s certainly not a shortage of new Ruby implementations.
For a while it seemed like the .NET platform was getting them all, but with the recent news of the JRuby core developers joining Sun Microsystems (SUNW), and now XRuby, it seems things are back into balance.
JRuby had reportedly seen a performance gain of about 50-60%, just a few weeks after the core developers became Sun employees. Sun’s backing make the project look good for the long term, and Java 6 SE + Free/libre Java make this look even better.
Strong points of XRuby:
- Simple internal architecture (makes fixing bugs easier)
- The parser generator is Antlr (way more flexible than yaccing around)
- They’re not afraid of the “E” word unlike cool people out there (Enterprise! Enterprise ! I said it !)
Keep the Ruby implementations coming !
Update: Pat Eyler interviews Evan, who’s developing Rubinius, another new Ruby implementation on top of a simpler, and arguably super-efficient Smalltalk-80-like VM.
Keep them coming… and coming… and…. !
Uma,
thanks for pointing out the interview with Evan. If you’re a rubinius fan you might want to keep an eye on the serial interview I just started with Evan and Wilson. If you’re collecting references to Ruby implementations, you might look at the Cardinal interview I did with Kevin Tew.
Thank *you* for stopping by, Pat.
I will surely keep an eye on your series, and will read back the previous Cardinal interview.
Keep up with the good work !