From: "Mauricio Fernández" <batsman.geo@...>
Date: 2003-08-14T03:31:40+09:00
Subject: Re: Java/Ruby communication

On Thu, Aug 14, 2003 at 02:57:01AM +0900, Hal E. Fulton wrote:
> > startsWith is public boolean
> java.lang.String.startsWith(java.lang.String).
> 
> Yeah, I knew *you* could do that... ;)
> 
> My Java is weak, but I'm enthusiastic about this

mine is weak too :-) I started this because I knew how to do it (and
had the first preliminary version running within the first 3 days),
not because I really wanted to use it :-P

Now I've switched my goal from providing a binding of JNI for Ruby
(which was mostly finished in the first week of coding) to allowing
full-featured, transparent usage of Java classes and objects from Ruby.
I have some code that makes the other way around work but there's still
a problem related to ruby's lack of thread safety (ie. the interpreter
not being reentrant).

> project (if for no other reason, because it's a
> bridge between Ruby and a well-known technology).
> 
> And I think that even if nothing else came out of
> the European Ruby Conference, the conference has
> probably justified itself.
> 
> I'm curious: How mature is this project? I know
> you've made rapid progress, but how close is it
> to being "finished" (whatever that means)?

I was really close to releasing a beta version (mostly feature-complete)
some 3 weeks ago. After doing some benchmarks, I dropped by #ruby-lang to
see what performance would be expected from rjni (so as not to disappoint
possible users :) and I realized I had better not release then, as
people would forever associate rjni with "dead-slow": on my machine,
I was getting ~2e4 method calls/s whereas Ruby was doing some 2e6 (method
dispatching is very slow cause I have to take care of method overloading,
type conversions, etc).

As I was about to re-implement some parts in C, Real Life distracted me
and I lost my Internet connectivity, which I recovered today (you might
have noticed by the relative lack of postings from me in ruby-talk :-).

I will soon start porting the method dispatching routines to C. As I
have the Ruby code to guide me it should be fairly fast, but OTOH
writing stuff in C will be much more painful for sure :-P


-- 
 _           _                             
| |__   __ _| |_ ___ _ __ ___   __ _ _ __  
| '_ \ / _` | __/ __| '_ ` _ \ / _` | '_ \ 
| |_) | (_| | |_\__ \ | | | | | (_| | | | |
|_.__/ \__,_|\__|___/_| |_| |_|\__,_|_| |_|
	Running Debian GNU/Linux Sid (unstable)
batsman dot geo at yahoo dot com

The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
	-- Andrew S. Tanenbaum