From: James Moore <banshee@...>
Date: 2006-09-11T12:52:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Sun hires JRuby developers.

> -----Original Message-----
> Of course I'm the wide-eyed innocent new employee, but there really
> seems to be a lot of excitement about the JRuby move and about dynamic
> languages in general at Sun. 

So I have to ask - is JRuby a good thing for the Ruby community, as opposed
to the Java community?  To me - admittedly, someone without a huge depth of
Ruby experience - it's not an obvious good idea.

The JVM is great for running client apps.  On the server side it's less than
useful; it's just another layer on top of the operating system.  Servers
have a well-understood interface, and putting something like .Net or the JVM
on them just gets in the way.  Sure, it may be handy for some very strange
edge cases, but Ruby runs on all the environments that the mainstream cares
about - Unix variants.  (OK, and you can run Ruby on Windows, but almost no
one will for production servers.)  

I'm guessing that for embedded devices Ruby isn't going to be a player, but
maybe I'm wrong and JRuby on something like a phone would be a huge plus.

Adding a JVM layer means you can interface to Java libraries, sure, but how
important is that?  Most of the time things provide interfaces in C, and
Ruby will accumulate ways of using those.  Seems like a time-limited problem
here that would lock Ruby into a Java-centric world.

Running on the JVM will mean that anything coded in C won't run, no?
Libraries that need screaming performance for particular carefully chosen
optimized bits aren't going to work with the JVM, and it strikes me as
bizarre to code in Java for performance.

 - James Moore