evan.musing << current

I’m also holding a last minute addition to the RailsConf schedule, CS Nerds Anonymous.

I’ll be chairing, getting the conversation started, basically being the ring leader. My hope is that people show up with fun topics to discuss, and we’ll take it from there. There is a good chance that we’ll have some lightning talks too. Again, doesn’t have to be Rails or even Ruby specific. Just fun topics that you think your fellow CS nerds would enjoy!

So wake up early on Sunday and come hang out! Bring your opinions on everything from optional type annotations in Ruby to Erlang monads!

A heads up that I’ll be participating in the RailsConf Community CodeDrive, hacking on Rubinius

Come hang out with me and other project hackers and share the love!

Bring your questions, quandaries, criticisms, and code!

See you Thursday morning at 10am!

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!

I’m trying to get back on the blog wagon, so I’m going to try and do more, shorter posts.

Anyways, the rubinius team is preparing for the preview release at rubyconf. We haven’t altered the development flow much, though I’m pushing people to get close their tickets for the release.

We moved over to using lighthouse for project track which is working out better for tracking the tickets, especially milestone wise.

At rubyconf, we’ll probably do some sanity checks on the git edge and then just cut a release directly from that. The stability is getting a lot better everyday, something I’m really happy with.

One reason I know it’s getting more stable is that I decided last week to totally start over on the rubinius compiler (the thing that converts ruby text into bytecode). I’ve totally reworked the architecture to be a lot more modular, faster, and much easier to test. I’ve been doing the development of this new compiler solely in rubinius (the original compiler was first built in MRI, like any good bootstrapped system). So far, I haven’t hit any bugs in rubinius while writing and testing compiler2. This fact makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.

See everyone at RubyConf!

I’ve uploaded the slides from my recent talk at Silicon Valley Ruby Conf (SVRC). Check them out.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve been invited to speak about rubinius at the upcoming SDForum Ruby Conference. I’ll be spicing up my usual rubinius intro talk by diving into some of the internals and showing how people can really customize the entire system.

I may also do my usual “blow your mind, then ask for questions” approach, where I go through everything, then leave about 20 minutes at the end for questions. Leave a comment if you think you’d like to see that.

Big thanks to (hasmanyjosh) Josh Susser for getting me on the speakers list (and also wrangling the conference as of late).

Also, please leave a comment on this post if there is any topic you’d like to see me go over. As usually, I won’t have the talk finalized until an hour before I give it.