Rumors of our Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
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.rborbin/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.
I think the blog post thing is one of the most important. Yeah, the code is on github and anyone can look at the current state and activity, but having you guys out there talking about it helps a lot in letting the community know you’re still alive
Do you guys have anything in CI that does performance testing? I realize if not it’d just be more work, but some basic “real world” benchmarks that could be run on each check-in and then put into a public graph would be really nice – let people know where you are and where you’re going
I’m still very enthusiastic about rubinius – regardless of setbacks, you guys seem to have come a long way in a short time, especially relative to other VMs
pmeserve
May 29, 2009 at 7:06 am
I didnt have time to check on rubinius progress – I am already too busy with some other projects – I think regular blog posts are indeed the best way to keep a lot of people updated. I mean, they could go and ask on #rubinius too, but a static blog entry is so much better for status information than molesting some random guys on IRC
mark
May 30, 2009 at 12:31 pm
[...] the works since 2006, the Rubinius team lost a few developers early this year, but the project is alive and healthy. The VM has been rewritten in C++, a JIT compiler has been added, and you can now run mongrel, [...]
State of Ruby VMs: Ruby Renaissance - igvita.com
November 20, 2009 at 2:04 pm