From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2009-03-01T06:16:44+09:00
Subject: Priorities for JRuby 1.3

With JRuby 1.2 almost out the door, we should talk a bit about where to 
go with JRuby 1.3. There's always more work to do, but in this case 
there's a few directions we could probably go.

Some obvious items will continue to see work:

* 1.9 libraries, interp, compiler, parser
* 1.8.6 bugs

But there's others that we may need to prioritize:

* 1.8.7 support
* Ruby execution performance (how fast do you want it?)
* Specific library performance (YAML, IO, Java)
* More Java integration refactoring (esp. subclassing)
* "Compiler #2" to produce normal Java classes from Ruby
* Improvements to AOT compilation (all-at-once, eliminate runtime codegen)

And there's a number of internal chores to work on too:

* Start generating most of the call path, to reduce duplicate code
* Specific-arity optimizations for block yield (could be big)
* Compiler cleanup and refactoring
* Modularization of core classes that aren't valid on applet, Android, 
secured envs, etc; also may allow shipping smaller runtimes
* More startup perf work; I have a few ideas

As always, there's way more tasks than the few of us committing to JRuby 
can work on, so I think we need to hear from users what's important. Any 
of these? Other items?

- Charlie