JRuby Team Making Progress

Posted by Obie Fernandnez on Oct 21, 2006

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Reporting live from RubyConf 2006

Thomas Enebo, one of the leads of the JRuby project was not able to attend RubyConf this year. Instead he spent this weekend getting the latest release of his project out the door, JRuby 0.9.1. Development velocity and the excitement of the community is only increasing since Sun hired Tom and co-lead Charlie Nutter in early September. The latest version picks up 50 to 60% performance gains over 0.9.0, closes 86 JIRA issues, improves support for Rails, and incorporates significantly better integration with Java classes.

Tom also announced that talented Swede Ola Bini has been made a JRuby core team member. He posted about the release too:

This past months have been great for JRuby, and I know that it will get even better from now on. My personal goal for 0.9.2 is to have complete Java YAML support in, and a working OpenSSL library.

JRuby 0.9.1 features notable improvements, among them considerably better performance across the board. Charles Nutter is here at RubyConf and I had the opportunity to ask him about his "performance crusade". He stated that language support is now good enough that it is actually somewhat difficult to find new bugs, which is shifting focus to refactoring and performance. Across the board, JRuby is still 40 to 60 percent slower than the C Ruby interpreter, but the latest release features some 4x to 6x performance gains in certain components. According to Charles, certain micro-benchmarks are now faster than the C Ruby interpreter -- a good sign of things to come.

Other release notes for JRuby 0.9.1:

• New interpreter design
• Refactoring of method dispatch, code evaluation, and block dispatch code
• Parser performance enhancement
• Rewriting of Enumerable, StringScanner and StringIO in Java
• New experimental syntax for implementing interfaces

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   fantastic

   by Michael Neale

   Thats a lot of achievement in a small amount of time. Imagine what we will have in a years time (or even 6 months). Probably one of the smartest investments Sun has made lately ! And cheap - hiring 2 people !

   Reply

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   Re: fantastic

   by Christoph Henrici

   Yep, i agree, great. This could give the whole Java centric development yet another boost. A whole new Thread theme will emerge - not Ruby vs. Java - but Ruby with Java, how can we gain from both ..;-). In that vain i specially like the syntax for interfaces.
   Even Microsoft seems to see the potential and has taken measures: www.infoq.com/news/RubyCLR-Microsoft

   Reply

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