evan.musing << current

We’ve been pretty quiet with Rubinius developments for a while, so I thought I’d bring people up to speed.

The previous year has seen a lot for the project. We were sad a number of developers were laid off the project, but that has only increased our desire to get the project to a usable state.

Some of the highlights include, but are not limited to:

• Rewriting the VM in C++
• Experimenting and building multiple JIT compilers
• Pushing RubySpec completeness and compliance levels
• Getting large scale libraries like Rails and RubyGems running

All those things are available today in our git repo on github.

Recently, Brian Ford and I published a roadmap, laying out the activities of most importance over the next few months. We’re going to try and be more vigilant about updating blogs and roadmaps in the coming months, to keep people more up-to-date.

Finally, a lot of people ask me “How can I help on Rubinius? I don’t have a lot of time.” The answer is simple:

• Download your favorite library
• Try it under Rubinius:
  • bin/rbx test/test_whatever.rb or
  • bin/rbx gem install rspec; bin/rbx -S spec my_spec_dir
• Report bugs that you find to our github Issue tracker.

The more people start to report bugs, the more coverage we get over the vastness of the ruby landscape. So while we’re hard and work getting the performance up, you can help out getting the compliance up.

Thanks again to the ruby community for all the patience you have shown the team over the years. Rubinius has been a long road, but I really feel like we’re onto something big.

In the coming months, I’m going to try and post more posts about technical aspects of Rubinius, so look for those.