Welcome to the Club
I’ve like to formally welcome the maglev development team over at Gemstone to the Ruby environment club.
For those of you that haven’t yet heard of maglev, it’s a brand new Ruby VM being developed by the folks over at Gemstone. Gemstone is the makers of probably the most advanced object-oriented database used today, and have traditionally been a Smalltalk shop till recently.
With the tide rising on Ruby, I’m happy to see another player enter the field. This only means that Ruby is continuing to mature and see that the community is healthy.
I was personally excited to read an interview with Bob Walker and Avi Bryant concerning maglev, because Rubinius is mentioned more than a few times. They’re looking at Rubinius for a couple of reasons. For one, the RubySpec suite we’ve developing and are about to spin off. The more people that we see using the suite and depending on it, the more mature it will become. Not having a spec for Ruby is commonly touted as a reason that it’s a toy, immature language, and anything we can do to dispel that thinking is good for the community.
The other reason that I’m excited about maglev is that they’re taking a very similar approach to the problem of building a Ruby environment. Like Rubinius, the VM is minimal and most of the kernel is implemented in Ruby.
My hope is that the kernel of Rubinius can be refactored and developed to be generic enough for other environments to use. While I know little about maglev’s current environment, they’re a natural build off the work in the Rubinius kernel. I’d hate to see people develop the code functionality of a ruby environment yet again (I count 5 code bases to this effect currently: MRI, JRuby, Ruby.NET, IronRuby, and Rubinius).
Being able to use a generic Ruby kernel is not unique to a smalltalk style VM. With some luck, it could be used by the folks in other environments as well. In my eyes, this is a big win for everyone. For one, this would mean a common code base that consists of the primary Ruby functionality, and thus would mean a vastly reduced worry of fragmentation. Plus it would alleviate the need for this code to be written again, letting future environment developers focus on taking Ruby to the next level in terms of platform integration, performance, etc.
