evan.musing << current

The venerable Eric Hodel (drbrain) has whipped the rubinius team into blogging more, so this should be the first of many posts to come.

Development front

We continue to push forward, getting rubinius running everyday ruby code. I continue to use irb under rubinius daily, and it’s proved quite stable.

Though, we’ve begun to hit the standard lib code that is quite tricky. Case in point, mathn.rb. mathn.rb adds some new methods to Fixnum and Bignum, as well as redefining some very core methods, like, Fixnum#/ (divide). We’re currently working through how to support this, because as is, when mathn redefines that method to start returning Floats, most of the rubinius system goes south. Thats because the kernel currently assumes that if it uses Fixnum#/, a Fixnum is returned, and it can pass that to other primitives and such.
We’re still unsure about the long term solution for this, but it does bring up a problem with having a very open, dynamic language, where the kernel of the language uses that same open, dynamic runtime. A user can change the behavior of a core, system method, and effect a lot more than they could in MRI. This is the famous double edged sword.
My hope is that we’re able to code the kernel a little defensively and really stabilize the kernel to the point that these kinds of changes wont cause the whole system to go south.

Conference front

Seems that 2008 is going to be the year of conferences for me.

• On Feb 8th and 9th, Ezra and I will be at acts_as_conference, giving a charity tutorial talk about how to be a better ruby developer.
• Next, I’ve been invited to give at talk about rubinius, as well as the “Party” keynote (not sure what the party part is actually) at RubyFools over in Copenhagen, Denmark. This should be a lot of fun for a few reasons.
  1. I’ll be giving a non-Rubinius specific talk for once (the keynote), which is something I’ve wanted to do for a while.
  2. I’ve never been to Denmark, so it’s always fun to visit a new city.
  3. Abby is coming too! She’s going to sightsee and such while I’m at the conference, and we’ll have a few days before and after to take day trips and such. She loves europe, it should be a great time.
• There a bunch after this, but I’m not yet sure which I’m going to. The total is something like 5 or 6 before June 1st, so it’s going to be busy busy busy no matter what.

More to come!