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Sun Backs Ruby by Hiring Main JRuby Developers

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the feel-the-love dept.

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."

7 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. Great News by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is great news for several reasons.

    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 .NET.

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    Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
    1. Re:Great News by Per+Wigren · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The language itself isn't slow, the current interpreter is.

      The solution is YARV (Yet Another Ruby VM) which will be the official Ruby VM in v2.0. Ruby 2.0 (thanks to YARV) will have JIT and a superfast optimizer. You can get a (very buggy) pre-beta version from SVN right now. Benchmarks show that it will be about as fast as Java and .NET in most situations. Slower in some situations, faster in some.

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      My other account has a 3-digit UID.
    2. Re:Great News by masklinn · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Two seconds of Googling could have told you that the JVM has supported more languages than .net for a long time.

      I may be overreaching here, but I think that part of his point was that Sun never ever officially endorsed any language but Java on the Java platform. Only now that MS has started championing a pretty much official IronPython effort has Sun discovered dynamic languages, and started working towards making the JVM more dynamic-languages friendly.

      Which is a damn shame, because they had Jython years ago, which they could easily have supported at almost no cost, and they let the project die on it's own.

      --
      "The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
  2. Support for Dynamic languages by EqualSlash · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Support for Dynamic languages by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Smalltalk, the archetypal dynamic language, already runs quite happily on top of the JVM. Sun doesn't need better technology, they need better marketing. Last time I checked, there were more languages supported by the JVM than the .NET CLR, but Sun only ever talk about Java while Microsoft talk about everything. This is a PR move to let the world know that the JVM is not just for Java.

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      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  3. GPL? by giafly · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    Reduce, reuse, cycle
  4. after letting Jython languish by hashmap · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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