Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:
Talk about trolling...
Yeah ... it's become a tradition for me every Saturday to try to be provocative. 
JRuby could only become the "one true way" if the community decided to move that direction. I have no desire to make that happen; I just want to make JRuby as good as possible. If the end result is what ALL Rubyists actually want out of Ruby, great. I don't expect that will happen. However I know it will be the right answer for a growing number of Rubyists, and certainly the right answer for Ruby in a Java world.
I think the best answer is for Rubyists to avoid thinking about JRuby in terms of Java. JRuby is Ruby, with a different VM underneath. If you could have Ruby on VM X, where X had full native threading, advanced garbage collection and memory management, fast synchronous and asynchronous IO, JITing to native code, runtime optimization, and built-in support for dynlangs, wouldn't you want that?
That's the JVM.
That's the JVM on x86 (32?) under Windows, Linux and SPARC/Solaris. How about PowerPC Macs? Intel Macs? AMD64? Alpha/Tru64?
Again, *I* don't support dropping other implementations of Ruby. If nothing else, Microsoft will make at least one release of at least one Ruby implementation. And I'm sure Matz and Koichi will continue leading the community path.
The community path doesn't have to exclude paid developers from Microsoft or Sun. I am as much a part of the community as you are.
I'm glad to hear that. As I noted in another post, however, many more people in the corporate world get paid to work *with* open source software than get paid to work *on* open source software. For every lucky Charles Oliver Nutter or John Lam, there are hundreds of people like me who can only contribute in off hours and to things not related to our employment.
What I'm *not* sure about is whether Rubinius will flourish. Cardinal seems pretty much dead, but I think there's a lot of energy behind Rubinius.
There's energy, but not numbers. Rubinius is cool, no doubt about it...I just hope more folks step up to the plate to help contribute time and effort into it.
Well ... there are some corporations who haven't taken a major stake in Ruby like Sun and Microsoft have.
Cardinal's only problem is that it suffers from Parrot.
All I know about Parrot is what I read in the O'Reilly book on Perl 6 and Parrot. I don't know what's wrong with Parrot, but I can't imagine that it's anywhere near as good as the JVM.
And perhaps once JRuby runs Rails perfectly, or exceeds YARV performance, or this or that, we'll be moved on to other projects. But there's a lot of potential in sticking with JRuby for the long haul. I realize that, and Sun realizes that. You can FUD all you like, but believe me: Sun is serious about this stuff.
Sun is serious about a lot of things. Intel was serious about a lot of things until AMD started eating their breakfast (nobody will *ever* eat Intel's lunch or dinner.) Then they said, "OK ... lay off a bunch of managers ... focus on our core business ... sell off unprofitable businesses."
I agree there's a lot of potential in sticking with jRuby for Sun. That potential needs to be converted to profit, and that can only be done by being competitive in the marketplace -- by satisficing rather than optimizing.
jRuby is an investment. Only time will tell whether that investment will pay off and what the payoffs will be. I don't know enough about the Java runtime (or the CLR or Parrot, for that matter) to predict success or failure. I'm personally much more interested in the open source community efforts. There are many more opportunities for me to create signal there than there are in two corporations, neither of which pays me a dime.
Ola already mentioned that JRuby is as open-source and community-driven as anything. There's a growing community of contributors, Ola is part of the core team, and we're going to add more non-Sun committers soon. Claiming that JRuby is somehow less open or less communal than C Ruby is pretty silly.
Well ... my choice of the Matz/Koichi line has more to do with my lack of knowledge of the JVM and CLR than it does with the nature of how they are funded. But judging by the howls in the Linux community that went up over the Microsoft/Novell deal, the persistent whining around Sun's slow pace at opening up Java technology, I think the Matz / Koichi path is more likely to be more peaceful, in addition to being more interesting in the computer science sense.
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M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/
If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.