evan.musing << current

A long overdue update about my big project rubinius.

Scheduling

The team is still moving along nicely, still aiming for a 1.0 release by RubyConf 2007. We’ve still got a ways to go, but I’m confident. A part of the team is getting together for a sprint in mid September. Other projects have used sprints to really pull away, productivity wise, and I’m hoping we can do the same.

Git

In the last few days, I decided to migrate the project off Subversion to Git, the DSCM. While I’m certain some will see this as a complete waste of time, I feel that it’s important for the project in the long term, and the developers in the short term.

Long Term

As many people are aware, the mainline ruby interpreter (MRI) suffers a lack of transparency. The perception (I can only speak for rubyists in the US, and perhaps a few in Europe) is that ruby-core team works at their own pace and doesn’t accept much input into the process, nor does it report on the process much.
Now, whether or not you agree with that assessment is not what I’m concerned about. It’s the long term perception and possibility that this same thing could happen to rubinius. So rather than wait and see, I’ve decided that the best way to avert this is to make it as easy as possible to contribute and progress rubinius. Again, some will argue that git was not required to reach this goal, and that is a valid argument. Part of it was just a irrational decision, I’ve been interested in git for a while and wanted to play with it more.

Short Term

Local branches, sane merging, a toolkit interface, oh my! I’ve already fell in love with the parts of git that svn lacks, which in my book, was a reason to switch anway. The tools are richer and more powerful. The code is cleaner. Nuff said.

Application Push

We’re currently in a phase of development I’ve been calling Application Push, which is just a fancy term for try to run shit. The existing body of ruby code is quite dense and provides an excellent proving ground to flesh out rubinius. The project has finally progressed enough that this level of proving can be done. Charles has talked about how this style of dev is what really pushed JRuby to 1.0, so we’re hoping to follow in those same footsteps.

Currently playing in iTunes: The Outernationalist by Thievery Corporation