From: Charles Oliver Nutter <headius@...>
Date: 2010-01-26T17:40:24+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby bounties--list of bounties

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 9:17 AM, Tony Arcieri <tony@medioh.com> wrote:
> The problem with this attitude is that you eschew some great, robust
> libraries that are already out there that solve complex problems.  Parsing
> XML is a bitch.  Fortunately, there are already some great libraries to do
> this.  There's the libxml2 library, which Nokogiri uses, and Java ships with
> some great XML libraries to.
>
> Will we ever see a pure Ruby library as robust and powerful as these (all
> performance considerations aside)?  REXML certainly isn't there yet.  Is it
> really worth writing a library in pure Ruby when robust libraries already
> exist that Ruby can tap into?

<rant>
It's probably also worth pointing out that various folks in the Ruby
community have continually panned anyone having any association with
Java. Hell, at my first ever JRuby talk in San Diego, I was openly
mocked by other presenters. And I still see other Java/JVM users get
the same treatment, both on these lists, at conference talks, and in
the hallway track. Apparently MINASWAN doesn't apply to folks using
Java or the JVM. :(

Unfortunately, it's exactly those Java folks that could help
accelerate Ruby adoption *and* help maintain Java/JVM versions of key
native libraries like Nokogiri or RMagick. If we did more to embrace
JVM users, rather than insulting them for using a different tool,
maybe extension writers would have more help supporting JRuby (and the
same goes for other managed runtimes like .NET/CLR).

The Ruby world shouldn't be a "C hackers only" club. Native extensions
tend to make it so.
</rant>

Rant aside...I really do want to make it easier to support JRuby,
regardless of whether folks need C or Java. Tell me what needs to be
done and help me find resources to do it :)

- Charlie