evan.musing << current

So, I’ve officially started accepting donations after Geoff Grosenbach became my new hero and donated $1000. So naturally, questions have come up…

• Why should I donate time/money to rubinius?

  The answer is simply because you believe that rubinius benefits the community. Therefore getting it to a state where the community can get it is a goal you want to help with.

  So…

• How does rubinius help the community?

  I love the ruby language. Its grace and elegance are second to none in my opinion. But lurking under that beautiful language is a runtime in distress. Even Matz has admitted this by putting the energy of the future into YARV. So, there are features that the runtime and language needs that the current interpreter just isn’t up to: bytecode and native threads being just 2.

  So why not put your money/time into YARV? I’m not putting my money/time into YARV because I don’t believe it’s the right way to accomplish the goals. (NOTE: I’ve tried hard in the past few months to not be critical of YARV and the current interpreter too much. But people have asked, so here’s my opinion) YARV may or may not see the light of day. It’s been in development for 2+ years and while it’s getting close, matz has not committed to it for at the very least another 2 years. So, if we wait for YARV, the community is still a long ways away from a modern VM. Plus, I believe that YARV has a lot of the same problems the current interpreter has. It’s filled with very complicated, undocumented structure that makes working on the core quite difficult.

  I believe that the future of the ruby core is in a simple core and a simple architecture that is easy to modify. Rubinius goes to vast lengths to keep the core parts as simple as possible. Because in the end, it shouldn’t just be me and a few core developers who can dive into the core and change things. I want it to grow and flourish in the hands of everyone, and I believe the only way to do that is to build in that virtue from the beginning.

• How will rubinius make my life/work easier/better?

  There are a lot of different ways to answer this question. So I’ll say this: rubinius aims to be simple at the core so it can be a lot of things to a lot of people. The longer way of saying that is that firstly, rubinius can be customized to make your life easier. While we know ruby is already highly customizable, rubinius aims to go even beyond that.

  Secondly, rubinius will fit into places the current interpreter won’t. One good example is that rubinius is all driven by bytecode and will even have hooks to further help companies protect their ruby intellectual property. To companies, that means ruby is much more enticing to use. And the more companies that use ruby, the more people, and the community grows. But don’t misread that and think that I’ve only developed rubinius to make companies happy. That’s just an example of where the “simple core, simple architecture” paradigm allows the whole project to remain agile and customizable by everyone that wants to use it.

I hope that clears things up rather than making them more confusing. Please comment on this post and I’ll clear things up and answer any questions people have.