From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2006-09-11T15:20:33+09:00
Subject: Re: Sun hires JRuby developers.


I fully agree to what Ken and Rich have said.  Some more comments below.

James Moore wrote:
> 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.

If the requirement is that a piece of software must run on a variety of 
different platforms a VM definitively helps in getting there.

 >  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 wouldn't be so sure of that.  I don't have current statistics (I 
believe they are out there somewhere on the web) but there are certainly 
Windows hosted production servers out there.

> Running on the JVM will mean that anything coded in C won't run, no?

There is JNI in case you need to interface with C.

> 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.

While that may be the case Java's performance is definitively 
competitive.  Also, success of a software project is more often than not 
determined not by the ultimate speed that a platform provides but by the 
time it takes to implement it.

Kind regards

	robert