Virtual Surreality
It’s too real to be true

Charles Nutter has just written up a nice summary of the things in Thomas Enebo’s announcement of RC2 of JRuby 1.1

He talks in general about the astoundingly improved performance characteristics, particularly when compared to the Ruby 1.8.6 and 1.9 native interpreters, as well as the better use of JVM resources. Let alone the 260 bug fixes since RC1.

There’ll be more from me soon about our commercial experiences with JRuby and hopefully give you some fuel for introducing Ruby into your large, conservative corporate environment. I have to say, going back 2 years and thinking about the “enterprise readiness” of Ruby, things have changed a lot - almost exclusively due to the work done on JRuby. The pace at which the JRuby team work to address issues and improve the platform is outstanding, and puts commercial software vendors (particularly those hawking development tools) to shame. Things also have a long way to go - there are many, many solutions that would still be recommended around a recent version C# / .NET or Java implementation and that doesn’t look like changing for some time. The team behind JRuby is multi-skilled and very aware of innovations in other languages and platforms and I think this is one of their key success factors.

If you are evenly remotely interested in working on an OSS project, I encourage you to contribute to JRuby, even if it’s just to identify a problem to be fixed - it’s fun, it’s a great community, you’ll learn a lot about Ruby and the JVM, and you’ll work with some of the best guys in the business.