Sun hires the JRuby team
Posted by josh September 07, 2006 @ 07:14 PM
Tim Bray has announced that Sun Microsystems has hired Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, the developers behind JRuby. Tim's announcement has a FAQ that probably answers many of the questions you have. My favorite bit:
Is Sun responding to hype? Yes, if by "hype" you mean a genuine groundswell of interest in the developer community.
Congratulations to Charles, Thomas and Tim. It's exciting to see Sun supporting this project, and it will be interesting to see what they produce.
This is great news for JRuby and Ruby in general.
Markus
Congratulations!
Cool beans. Way to go Sun.
Oh no! If JRuby succeeds, we’ll be able to deploy our rail apps on big iron, and even connect to all those enterprise features on the J2EE platform.
What will the FUDders have left to argue against rails?
I am very excited by this, in particular by the comments Tim makes.
It seems they’ll be putting emphasis on developer tools, so I’m curious to see how RadRails plays into this.
Somebody clue me in – a Ruby interpreter WRITTEN IN JAVA? Don’t people already think Ruby’s too slow?
Is it really?
The best of all is that open source democratic projects start to be taken VERY serioulsy even by large companies…
But my biggest fear is: I wonder if the performance step ahead for JRuby promissed by Sun thanks to InvokeDynamic and co JVM support will come too late (it’s targeted for java 7). If fast JRuby is only available with java 7, will people wait for that or will they rather jump to other potential (community driven?) implementations?
Joe Ruby: I do not understand your point. Java is faster than Ruby or Python. JVM is very highly optimized and now it is almost as fast as C++. Look at IronPython which uses CLR and which is also faster than standard CPython.
I dont think its written in Java.
Joe, you’re a VBScript/Wasabi programmer aren’t you? ;-)
I’m extremely excited by this news. Hopefully now we’ll be able to sneak ruby through the system!
I don’t know much about these things, but I don’t think the JRuby is written in Java. I think it’s “written” in JVM. Isn’t that how the whole Jython thing came about?
IronPython is like Jython, just for the CLR.
Ravi, nice DSQ.
“Java is faster than Ruby or Python.”
LMAO.
I still don’t understand why this is a big deal, other than Java’s compile-once promise or perhaps that a big company is getting behind Ruby (uh oh, does that include all the Enterprisey people too?).
The Java virtual machine is faster than the Ruby interpreter, but it does consume a lot more memory from what I have seen.
It is foolish to pretend that raw performance does not matter and it will be interesting to see performance of Ruby running on different virtual machines… like the jvm, clr, and yarv.
Instead of conjecturing about what it’s written in, why not go check? You’re already in a freaking browser, for pete’s sake:
From http://jruby.codehaus.org
Features100% pure Java, most builtin Ruby classes, BSF, tri-license…still don’t see what the appeal is.
This is significant because anyone who needs to use Java for whatever reason (perhaps you’re integrating with older legacy systems, or even just a standard Java system itself) can now use Ruby to do development.
I have to say, it’s sad to see the elitism creeping into the Ruby community since Rails has become popular. I know some of you hate everything Java, but Ruby is not a silver bullet.