Recent Ruby News

Wow, you get wrapped up in other things and time flies. It’s been a while since I posted something here and there have been all kinds of changes in the Ruby community.

While MagLev is creating quite a stir, see Antonio Cangiano’s recent blog or Chad Fowler’s, and seeing Rubinius and IronRuby running Rails (at least to some degree) is exciting, these aren’t the only things going on these days.

One of my favorites is the new Ruby Benchmarks Suite mailing list. This is a very smart group of people working on a common suite of micro and macro benchmarks, combined with common programs, that can be used to test the relative performance of different builds of diffent versions of Ruby on different kinds of hardware. It’s kind of like my real world benchmarks, only more comprehensive.

I’m also interested in the recent release of the Dramatis Actor Library for Ruby and Python. Ruby already has several libraries supporting actor style concurrency (see my blog post and interview about Revactor for an example), but this is interesting because it bridges over into the Python world. I can’t wait to see what comes out of this collaboration.