Engine Yard Has 5 Full-Timers Working on Rubinius
Why Rubinius Matters to Ruby's Future is a short blog post by Reg Braithwaite that explains why the Rubinius "Ruby in Ruby" implementation project is important to Ruby's future. In short, it's because Rubinius lets you tweak and add new features to the language at a low level using the Ruby language itself (well, a subset, but who's counting.. Captain Crunch?).
Ordinarily, such a short post, despite being good, wouldn't get a post to itself on the Ruby Inside front page, but a comment from Ezra Zygmuntowicz, of Engine Yard, and a co-worker of Rubinius' founder, Evan Phoenix, got me little tip-tappers all over-excited:
[...] we (engineyard.com) have hired a full time staff of 5 people to work solely on Rubinius. Expect a lot of progress over the next few months.
Five full-time staff members on Rubinius? I'm sure the whole Ruby world can't wait to see the result of this in a few months' time!
December 30, 2007 at 9:28 pm
Thanks for the link. I am personally *very* excited about Rubinius' potential, and I wish EngineYard every success as a business as well as as a sponsor.
p.s. I must say you have me worried: if 795 words (not including source code) is one of my "short" posts, I really need to put my writing on a diet.
December 30, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Peter - do you have any information on how compatible with Rails Rubinius will be, or is? Is it a drop in replacement for Ruby itself? Thanks.
December 30, 2007 at 9:39 pm
Actually, the news of five full time staffers while definitely intriguing, doesn't really tell the juicy part of the story.
The plot thickens when you hear who those five are...
December 30, 2007 at 9:53 pm
I'm not currently in a situation where I can look around for citations, but from the benchmarking I've seen, in theory it's a bit like JRuby was a year ago.. most stuff will work, but the edge cases will probably screw you over. From what I recall of a benchmark I linked to recently, Rubinius passed nearly all of the benchmarks with reasonable times, so it surely can't be too far off (considering how quick JRuby got from that stage to where it is now).
December 30, 2007 at 10:21 pm
Reg: Oh it's nothing to do with your posts being a certain length, it's just you might have noticed Ruby Inside tends to link to either projects or tutorials / long posts in single posts now, and the shorter posts in the "Interesting Tidbits" series instead now :) That's all I meant :)
December 31, 2007 at 6:13 am
I wrote details of this story up a couple weeks ago at InfoQ: http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/12/engine-yard-bets-big-rubinius