
Evan Phoenix on Rubinius
Evan Phoenix discusses Rubinius, a modern Ruby VM loosely based on the Smalltalk-80 architecture. The goal is to build a fast, efficient VM with the latest research in dynamic language implementations
Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community

Evan Phoenix discusses Rubinius, a modern Ruby VM loosely based on the Smalltalk-80 architecture. The goal is to build a fast, efficient VM with the latest research in dynamic language implementations

Zed Shaw sat down with InfoQ's Obie Fernandez to talk about his project Mongrel. The discussion moves on Ruby in the Enterprise and ways to make money from it. The interview ends with Zed talking about his ventures into languages such as Smalltalk, Lua and the Forth-inspired Factor.

Martin Fowler, Frank Buschmann, Steve Cook, Jimmy Nilsson, and Dave Thomas discuss the future of software development. Topics covered include outsourcing, is Google the next MS?, multi-core & parallism, grid computing, software stacks of the future, and more. A thoroughly thought-provoking panel! JAOO is producing the QCon event.
OODB vendor Gemstone works on a Ruby VM called MagLev. Working with Seaside's and DabbleDB's Avi Bryant, Gemstone bases the Ruby runtime on their Smalltalk VM to offer performance and powerful persistence features. We talked to Avi Bryant and Gemstone's Bob Walker about the technology behind MagLev and the plans for it.
Wilson Bilkovich is an Engine Yard employee working as a core Rubinius team member. Wilson discusses various Rubinius systems and how they're implemented, as well as distributed version control systems, the Ruby Hit Squad, RubyGems and more.
The One Laptop Per Child project has starting shipping its first generation of XO laptops. OLPC "is not a laptop project, it is an education project", explains Nicholas Negroponte, director of the project. A full Sugar based development environment is available for developers to contribute new activities to the project. Sugar supports collaborative activities when XOs are meshed together.
Debugging Ruby code just got much faster - at least with Rubinius. Unlike the debuggers for MRI or JRuby, the Rubinius full speed debugger allows programs to run at normal speed while they're debugged. We take a look at how the Rubinius VM's transparent design made this possible.
A recent debate on the RubyTalk list asked where to use is_a? vs respond_to? This highlights situations where objects respond to the same interface, but don't share any superclasses. We look at this debate and solutions in other languages such as Smalltalk, Erlang, and Scala.
A blog post titled "Debugger Support Considered Harmful" claims that Ruby debugging support is lacking - and that that's a good thing. We look at the various rebuttals and the state of Ruby debuggers.