The State of Ruby VMs — Ruby Renaissance

igrigorik writes "In the short span of just a couple of years, the Ruby VM space has evolved to more than just a handful of choices: MRI, JRuby, IronRuby, MacRuby, Rubinius, MagLev, REE and BlueRuby. Four of these VMs will hit 1.0 status in the upcoming year and will open up entirely new possibilities for the language — Mac apps via MacRuby, Ruby in the browser via Silverlight, object persistence via Smalltalk VM, and so forth. This article takes a detailed look at the past year, the progress of each project, and where the community is heading. It's an exciting time to be a Rubyist."

Comments

Re:Ruby at a sight

[iluvcapra]

On Ruby's side:

• Pervasively object-oriented, with anonymous classes, metaclasses and proper private methods. However, if your keyboard doesn't have a period, you could be convinced it pervasively functional, since it has 1st-class blocks, closures and continuations.
• A very loose syntax, with no syntactic whitespace.
• A lot of mindshare and goodwill, centering on the Ruby on Rails framework.

Negatives:

• Interpreter has been too damn slow for too long, but as you see here they're working on it.
• it has a big learning curve for Python people. It's very different.

Re:Ruby Javascript

[caseih]

Truly spoken like someone who doesn't know appear to know anything about Javascript, and has never programmed anything significant in it. Or Ruby either for that matter. If you do, you should have backed up your comments with real evidence and experience rather than just a few silly expletives.

How does Ruby retain Perl's syntax but not the semantics? Sounds like you're making this up. Have you ever coded anything significant in Ruby? I don't care for Ruby's syntax either (the ability to call functions with () means you can pass functions around as parameters), but that doesn't make Ruby any less powerful as a full OOP, dynamic language.

As for Javascript, try using it for something significant sometime. Write a firefox plugin or something. Javascript is here to stay and is the mainstay of client-end user interface code. Javascript is an extremely powerful and dynamic language, akin to smalltalk in it's power and flexibility. Javascript uses a prototype-based style of OOP that takes some getting used to but is very powerful indeed. Even better Javascript has functional and lisp-like qualities to it. Javascript has its warts. Some of them are apparent if you've ever used Gnome Seed with GTK binding, from what I've read.

Despite all this I'd rather use python in the browser to script DOM objects, but ahh well. I'm also bitter that epiphany dropped Python in favor of Javascript for writing Epiphany plugins. Sigh.

Re:Ruby Javascript

[Serious Callers Only]

Faggot, I've had the misfortune of using both JavaScript and Ruby (for web development and scripting) more than you likely ever have, and ever will.

Or perhaps you're just some internet blowhard who likes to play to the peanut gallery? As you demonstrate very little in the way of knowledge in your posts, we'll never know. Your silly pronouncements of superiority in spite of very little knowledge of your interlocutor certainly make this a distinct possibility.

Have you looked at the syntax of Perl and Ruby? The vast similarities should be pretty clear to everyone but the stupidest of mental retards...then fuck off. You'll need to use both Ruby and Perl to experience Ruby's weak semantics compared to Perl.

You claimed that Ruby kept most of the syntax of Perl, but not the 'semantics' whatever that means in this context. Care to explain what you think it means, because you haven't so far?

I've used both, and there are similarities, but there are also many significant differences. The object system in Ruby is far less a tacked on afterthought, you don't have to declare variables with a prefix so there is less line noise, everything is an object, nicer blocks, etc. There is also quite a tradition of choosing the way which seems least surprising and sticking to it, as opposed to 'There is more than one way to do it' in Perl - that means radically different library classes.

The syntax of Ruby encourages legibility but keeps most of the shortcuts (in regexp for example) of Perl, while avoiding the horrific write-once possibilities of Perl which you seem to be so proud of (i.e. stuff can be done in fraction of a line of code); just because it can be done in half a line doesn't mean it should.

There is a spectrum from code which is far too verbose to code which is far too succinct (i.e. unintelligible even to the creator after a certain period), and I'd say Perl can be pushed too far to the succinct side, but that's personal preference really. It's quite possible to write good Perl code, but that doesn't make it the be all and end all of scripting languages, indeed several other languages are now more suitable for scripting if you prefer an object-oriented approach.

While I must agree with the sentiment that people who cheerlead for a certain language as radically different from all others need an education in the history and diversity of computer languages, to claim that Ruby is a bad copy of Perl without qualifying the statement betrays your lack of knowledge of the language, nothing more.