From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2008-11-20T02:39:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Ever heared of XRuby before?

Robert Dober wrote:
> Thanx folks I was really impressed by the performance of XRuby.
> By looking at the Hacking guide it seems like
> an MRI Ruby running on Java instead of C. Big difference would be that
> there is not an AST to be interpreted but a Java program that is
> compiled from Ruby and which implements the dynamic features of Ruby
> as an interpreter. Right?

XRuby is really far behind in supporting all of the more unusual 
features of Ruby, and with JRuby's compiler I believe we're faster on 
almost all the usual cases now. JRuby also has an ahead-of-time 
compiler, so you can just create .class files to ship.

Also, XRuby does nothing to integrate with Java at present, where JRuby 
provides pretty solid 2-way integration. I'm sure there's more we can 
learn from XRuby codebase, but most of the main features are already 
superceded by JRuby.

Perhaps we need a JRuby hacking guide? It's not very difficult to follow.

- Charlie