From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-11-11T13:00:46+09:00
Subject: Re: enterprise ruby

Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:
> Lionel Bouton wrote:
>> So as much as I'd like JRuby to succeed even if I don't use it myself
>> (currently), people willing to work on MRI (or YARV and Rubinious for
>> that matter) are most welcomed to do so too.
> 
> I think MRI is mostly a dead end at this point, unlikely to see any 
> major perf/scaling improvements anymore. If you're going to focus a lot 
> of time on tweaking and improving an implementation, I'd recommend 
> helping out one of the really active 1.8-compatible implementations 
> (JRuby being the most complete and furthest along) or a 1.9 
> implementation (YARV being most complete and furthest along...but we 
> have some 1.9 features in JRuby too).

1. As far as I know, *only* MRI is "100 percent MRI compatible". :) The 
other implementations are "extended subsets". JRuby is for the moment 
the most complete subset and has more extensions, i.e., Java libraries, 
an AOT compiler and all of the performance tuning that the JRuby team 
has done. I haven't heard much from the Parrot/Cardinal project 
recently, but I'm guessing we'll see IronRuby at close to the level of 
JRuby by early next year, and Rubinius some time in the spring.

2. I don't think MRI is a dead end at all, considering the discussions 
I've seen on this list just since I got back from RubyConf. I see people 
seriously proposing re-doing the garbage collector, for example, and I 
see other people investing a lot of effort in tweaking Rails to use Ruby 
and the underlying OS more efficiently.

3. As far as I know, YARV/KRI is the only serious 1.9 implementation.

I do think that there is probably more excitement and interesting work 
on YARV/KRI/1.9 than there is on MRI, or for that matter any of the MRI 
extended subsets. But MRI is hardly a dead end IMHO.