Sun Backs Ruby by Hiring Main JRuby Developers

pate writes "Sun has thrown some corporate weight behind Ruby, Rails, and dynamic languages by hiring the two main JRuby developers, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo. Charles posted about jruby stepping into Sun on his blog, and Thomas posted his take too. Tim Bray, who started the ball rolling posted about the JRuby Love."

Comments

Re:The way I see things...

[erig]

Lua is used a lot as an embedded language, especially in games such as World of Warcraft, etc., so I wouldn't say that it's unheard of.

Re:Not exactly a good thing

[RAMMS EIN]

``Apart from supposed portability I can't think of any.''

I don't think portability is the real advantage. I even doubt if Java really is more portable. No, the real advantages are safety and garbage collection. C and C++ programs are rife with format strings, unchecked return values, unchecked casts, unsafe I/O primitives, and manual memory allocation. All of these are rich sources of bugs. Buffer overflows are in the top three of most common vulnerability types (probably first after injection vulnerabilities, which Java's SQL API protects against, too). Memory leaks are also common, e.g. Firefox suffers badly from them. Unchecked return values have been responsible for some major privilege elevation vulnerabilities in Linux. All of these can't happen in Java, or at least, Java greatly reduces the risks.