Rubinius Tab Sweep

Ola Bini has written a couple of posts that touch on Rubinius and the other Ruby implementations. The first talks about the new weekly meeting of implementors, saying “[I]t’s a huge deal. This will make the lives of all Ruby implementations much easier, and the meeting yesterday actually accomplished some very nice things.” I hope we’ll see this yield more Ruby Implementor Summits and the like.

Ola also wrote about the RbYAML Project for the Google Summer of Code. As the RubyCentral organizer for the GSoC, I’m really excited that we have nine great looking projects (including RbYAML) that will really help the whole Ruby community.

Vladimir Sizikov wrote about the RubySpecs Project (an outgrowth of the Rubinius project). This one also tied into GSoC, we’ve got two students working on separate projects to improve spec coverage.

Charlie Nutter provided a good perspective on the various implementations. I’m not sure I agree with everything he says, but he’s a smaart guy and I don’t really want to bet against him either. Here’ the obligatory Rubinius quote:

Rubinius is, and always has been, a great project and a great idea. I talk with Evan and Brian and all the others on a daily basis, I contribute specs whenever I find gaps or fix bugs in JRuby, and I secretly harbor a desire to implement a JRuby/JVM backend for the Rubinius kernel. I’m sure we’ll see great things from Rubinius in the future.

Nikos Dimitrakopoulos provided some coverage of Ruby implementation performance. Rubinius doesn’t look to good, but the standard caveat still applies … they’re still focusing on completeness not performance.

Luis Lavena posted some surprising performance numbers for Rubinius. I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen Rubinius win a “shootout” with the Ruby 1.8.6. It might be a micro-benchmark, but I think som congratulations are in order.