Monday, September 24, 2007

Weighing In On The Upcoming Ruby VM Smackdown

Earlier today, I read with great interest the potentially inflammatory post where Ola Bini proclaims the Ruby VM wars already over, and basically divides the Ruby VM empire into two halves, with the center controlled by Rome, err, I mean Rubinius primitives.

I had already come to this conclusion a while ago. Not because I am smarter than anyone, FAR from it. Probably because I am more superficial, and easily impressed by meaningless characteristics, like how cool is the name Rubinius?

Seriously, back to something more erudite, like Ola's post. Notably missing from this future of Ruby utopia is any IronRuby/Ruby.NET vision. Is this a simple oversight, due to the pro-Sun anti-MS bias that any Java programmer has to have, or more likely knowing the source, is it because of the sadly glacial progress of Lam and his new friends, as compared to both Rubinius and especially JRuby?

Man, it must SUCK to work at Microsoft sometimes!

1 comment:

Ola Bini said...

Hehe. Actually, I tried to make it very explicit in the post that my proclamation ONLY referred to the war over C Ruby implementations. Java and .NET implementations have slightly different raison d'etres, and the war in their respective spaces I wouldn't like to pronounce anything about for the time being. Or rather, I think JRuby is doing great compared to XRuby, but the .NET space is still to immature.

Further, I'm pretty certain that these three domains will never overlap totally, since there is always important situations where a .NET runtime is important, or a Java application server, etc.