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

[RAMMS EIN]

``I've gotten to use Python in the last couple of years - it's concise, expressive, whole lot less verbose (compared to Java, C)''

On those issues, Ruby isn't very different. In fact, I think the reason there are so many heated debates about which of Ruby and Python is better is exactly because, all things said and done, the differences don't matter that much and your preference is largely a matter of taste.

``but bit problematic when trying for tighter design with bigger scopes.''

Ruby borrows features from other great languages like Lisp and Smalltalk, which allow it to more naturally express paradigms other than imperative, and classes-and-methods. On the other hand, there is something to be said for Python's "one way to do it", as well.

Comparing Ruby and Python, I find that Python programs tend to have cleaner syntax (fewer hieroglyphs in the code) whereas Ruby programs tend to have cleaner structure (program more closely expresses what is being done because the language is multi-paradigm).

For programming in the large, both languages have about the same advantages and disadvantages: you have metaprogramming, which is a big plus, but no static checking, which is a minus. Personally, I feel like metaprogramming is an integral part of Ruby programming, whereas, in Python, it runs contrary to the spirit of "one way to do it", but Python does support metaprogramming and plenty of people are putting it to good use.

``What are the pluses/minuses of Ruby compared to Python? Has it dumped all its Perlism now? (I looked at Ruby briefly years back).''

Ruby definitely hasn't dumped its Perlisms. That's both a blessing and a curse: on the one hand, it allows for ugly programs, on the other hand, sometimes it's useful to say in a few hieroglyphs what would otherwise require lots of boilerplate code. Again, taste plays a role, but I must note that many languages that forgo Perlisms usually end up adopting regular expressions anyway, only with less power and more leaning toothpick syndrome. Given the choice, I'd rather have first-class regular expressions like Perl, even though they are the worst offenders in making Perl code look like line noise.

Basically, if you like Python for its purity, you'll probably detest Ruby. It's messy. But if you like Python for its expressive power, you may like Ruby because it offers you more of that. If you like Python but want static typing, don't bother with Ruby, because it won't give you that. You might be better off trying OCaml, Haskell, or Common Lisp (with appropriate compiler) in that case. If you're looking for speed, those are better options, too.