From: Charles Oliver Nutter Date: 2010-12-21T22:12:03+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby and science ? On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 3:35 AM, Ryan Davis wrote: > Nice Ad Hominem. It's just that I don't need to know anything about jruby's implementation to identify someone passing the buck when they do it. No, you actually were wrong. We route around the JVM/JDK limitations in dozens of ways, so when I say something's a JVM/JDK problem but JRuby does it better, I mean it. > Or... are you claiming that JRuby doesn't suck at process manipulation and that JEG is wrong, or worse, a liar? By default, JRuby doesn't provide the best process manipulation support. But it's not inherently sucky at it, and with a few tweaks it can work just fine. JEG is claimed we "suck at process management" because of two reported bugs we didn't immediately fix, since fixing them would have required presenting platform-specific behavior and using native calls rather than JVM/JDK APIs. He disagrees with that decision. Others don't. I was clarifying for folks who might be confused by his statements. > But JEG is right, it does suck. That's not a terrible thing. Sometimes your dogmatic "rah rah java/jruby" thing blinds you to simple truths: jruby being built on the jvm gives it a lot of strengths, but as JEG said (so succinctly), "like anything, there are tradeoffs and JRuby sucks at other things". That's not the end of the world, but just because you claim it isn't so, doesn't make it true. JRuby does suck at some things, like startup time...which can make some aspects of typical UNIX parallelization (like spawning a new instance of yourself) suck pretty bad. But the process management APIs are easy to improve, so it's unfair to outright claim that "JRuby sucks" at them, when we've simply taken the path that serves the most users as well as possible. They're just not easy to improve while maintaining other non-sucky aspects of JRuby, like consistent cross-platform behavior. If we did things the way JEG wanted, we'd have other folks complaining "JRuby sucks" at cross-platform. So these blanket statements are at best misleading. And I'm not just claiming it's true. I've put in 4 years of work (with many others helping) making it true. - Charlie