From: Ken Bloom <kbloom@...>
Date: 2009-03-02T04:08:53+09:00
Subject: Re: Priorities for JRuby 1.3

On Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:16:44 -0500, Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:

> 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

I use Debian, who included 1.8.7 in their recent stable release, so most 
of my code is being targeted to 1.8.7 these days. While I understand (and 
agree with) philosophically the argument against making 1.8.7 to begin 
with, once it's out and once it's the default on my platform, then that's 
what I'm targeting.

If you're doing 1.9 libraries anyway, then I imagine it's relatively easy 
to create a 1.8.7 compatibility mode by shaking up the list of what 
methods are included in what classes under what circumstances. Right? If 
so, then do it. (I imagine it wouldn't kill the 1.8.6 compatibility mode, 
right?)

If it's really hard, and I'm the only voice talking, then maybe it's not 
worth your effort. I'm not using JRuby a whole lot now as it is.
 
* "Compiler #2" to produce normal Java classes from Ruby

This would be really cool. I had been using Groovy for this purpose some 
time ago, but ran away because it was slow (a problem that has since been 
mostly solved) and has confusing semantics (a problem that may never be 
fixed, since GPath seems to be their major selling point)

* Improvements to AOT compilation (all-at-once, eliminate runtime codegen)

I'm not sure what you have in mind here.



-- 
Chanoch (Ken) Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/