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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."
This is great news for several reasons.
.NET.
First, and most importantly, because Sun is now throwing its weight behind Ruby, which is a wonderful language. It does have its quirks (some weird syntax and the schizophrenia between procs and blocks), but it's still one of the better languages out there. Easy to write and understand, powerful, and succinct.
Secondly, because Sun is supporting JRuby, which is an alternate implementation of the language. This will put pressure on the language designers to spell out the language in a clear specification, rather than referring to some implementation for knowledge of how things work. One of the benefits of this is that it will cause features to be thought and debated about more, which I believe results in cleaner, nicer languages.
Thirdly, because the JRuby folks seem to have the plan to develop a compiler. This could lead to Ruby's run-time performance increasing enormously, widening the scope of the language to tasks that current Ruby implementations are simply too slow for (you can extend Ruby programs in C and JRuby programs in Java, but it would be preferable if one didn't need to).
Fourthly, because there is just a slight chance that Sun will decide to make the JVM more flexible and amenable to languages other than Java. Right now, the operations that the JVM supports are very much tied to the features of Java. Implementing some more flexible primitives would benefit not only JRuby, but also about any other language that targets the JVM, and make the Java platform more competitive with
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Long ago, Microsoft hired Jython creator Jim Hugunin to work on IronPython. The aim is to make dynamic languages like python work better in .NET platform. Looks like Sun doesn't want to lose out in the race in supporting dynamic languages.
Lua is interesting, it runs on it's own register based VM and LuaJIT does exactly what you think. Lua is only a small language and generally faster than C-ruby and C-python. I don't see anybody rushing to port this to run on the JVM/CLR, is this because the performance and memory use would absolutely suck?
Sun has thrown some corporate weight behind Ruby
Good thing, because that Oswald guy was starting to get on my nerves.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Currently JRuby is licensed under the GPL.
Given Sun's past criticism, I think it's fair to ask whether they have committed to using the GPL for future JRuby releases.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
``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.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Think harder.
I /whatnot ops?
How about a bazillion prewritten, documented, tested, standardized, open source library modules, many of them supplied by Sun with the language, to do bigmath/network/file/database/sql/2D-3Dgraphic/GU
Tell you what, you roll anything trickier than "hello world" from scratch in C/C++, and I'll do the same in Java, and we'll see who has the choice of more predefined stuff to use, and who finishes faster with a program that runs more correctly.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
So do many other languages. The main reason why Java worked wonders in the corporate world is marketting. Basically, Java is a victory of marketting over engineering.
Doesn't have near enough to be truely useful, and the explicit typing (lack of type inference) make it extremely verbose and annoying to work with. Much more than statically typed languages with type inference and extremely strong type systems (à la Haskell) for example.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
It would be nice if Sun hired the Jython team as well. :) Consider that they would then have two very popular scripting languages nicely supported under their portfolio.
.NET seriously enough.
I just don't think they are taking
People started speculating , this might be in response of Microsoft throwing weight behind Python, though I am not in that camp....but it would be interesting to see that how these interpreted languages will perform when hijacked by these JIT compilers( or whatever these sun guys tell you about their shiny bytecode stuff.)
I have seen JRuby code and the effort to use Java libraries from Ruby and it was plain scary, I would rather do pure Java. And support for rails is "miles before you and me can do some real code". According to Tom(one of the authors of Jruby):
"It should be stated clearly here, that the JRuby this is running on is not released code yet. In fact, our next release 0.9.0 will not quite be running this application out of the box"
So, we have a tight case there. Besides Matz is also working on Ruby2.0, which will have VM execution kind of stuff. So, though you may celebrate if you want, I would rather like to have C Ruby for my breakfast. There are two major problems of Ruby:
1. Slow (yes its slow and stylish)
2. GUI programming
And guess, what Jruby is not going to bring anything better on the table on these two fronts. With Introduction of IronPython, you can do GUI programming on Windows happily and PyGtk was there as shining example of one of the finest GTK bindings ever produced. Whereas, if you want to do, GUI programming with Ruby, how many REALLY good choices do we have? Though this might be humble opinion, but I have hated GTK for gui stuff, it sucks. Qt and Windows Forms are much better. Java applets suck even more.
I gots no love for Sun ... after all Jython been out for half a decade, and Sun has shown little to no interest in it ... just imagine how much better it would be if they had the foresight to support it and improve its performance
As far as I'm concenrned Sun is playing catch-up with Microsoft, and this is no more than a half assed response to MS releasing IronPython
I pick a 3d shooter. Now you get to pick anything less yawn inspiring than a database driven office app right? This is a fun game. ;)
Seriously though, each language has applications that it's well or badly suited for. Each moderatly proficient software developer should be able to pick the right tools for the job and be able to use them. No need to start holy wars over them.
I very much doubt that. It's languages like Perl, PHP, Ruby, and Python that have the odd features that cause massive problems when the language grows out of its initial niche and starts being applied to large, Real World problems. Many of these languages have little hacks that seemed advantageous when originally conceived, but later turned against them. Java has comparatively few of these issues (no list context vs. scalar context, scopes that don't nest, unpredictable syntax, etc.) - its main problem is that it's extremely verbose and repetitive.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Ruby on Rails has got a lot of attention. Many web sites that would have been built using Java are being built using Rails, and people were starting to ask if Ruby on Rails was the new, better Java.
This is an insurance policy for Sun, and a way for them to provide a migration path and say "Oh, OK, you can run your Rails site on our Java platform while you build the next version using J2EE".
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
instead of speculating? Here's Tim Bray's blog post about hiring them here and a follow up here.
from Tim's blog:
He answers more questions on his blog.