I saw that this didn't get a reply, so I figured I'd take a shot. I've just started to seriously get interested in contributing, so I may not have all my history/facts straight.
1. Rubinius started as an interest/labor of love by Evan Phoenix. It's gotten sponsorship from EngineYard in the form of two employed developers (Evan and Brian, I believe) that work on Rubinius full-time. Predicting the future is hard, but those two factors make me think Rubinius will be around for some time. Obviously the hope is for even more people to run their programs and apps on Rubinius and contribute back to keep it going. There has been talk about Rubinius being some kind of replacement for MRI but not by either core team (I could be wrong here). At very least, my impression is that neither side is really pushing for it, and each core team is content working on their own "branch" as they have different goals, etc. I personally don't think it will happen, which is fine. Rubinius offers its own advantages, which are distinct from the advantages of MRI (and JRuby). That said, Brian Ford was on an EngineYard podcast recently and noted that one of Rubinius' goals is to be a drop-in replacement for MRI in terms of compatibility, C extensions, etc. 2. It seems you're asking about the Rubinius VM vs. the JVM, and I can't speak to that intelligently. All I know is the Rubinius VM is small as VMs go and is designed to support the dynamic nature of Ruby. The JVM is a larger codebase but has a large amount of support to refine and extend it. The JVM is starting to add things like invoke-dynamic which will better support dynamic languages, but it's being added now not baked in. Again, this is my extremely coarse understanding of the differences. On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 8:41 AM, Glenn Dix <[email protected]> wrote: > The architecture for Rubinius looks like an exciting enhancement over > MRI in the areas of concurrency and memory management, but I have two > general questions: > > 1. Will the Rubinius project exist long-term, or will it be > assimilated into MRI or something else > 2. How will Rubinius be better than the JRE, other than for directly > supporting Ruby (e.g. java.lang.NullPointerException, system clock > skewing, incompatibility between minor revisions and patch releases, > weekly high severity vulnerability findings, etc.) > > -- > --- !ruby/object:MailingList > name: rubinius-dev > view: http://groups.google.com/group/rubinius-dev?hl=en > post: [email protected] > unsubscribe: [email protected] -- --- !ruby/object:MailingList name: rubinius-dev view: http://groups.google.com/group/rubinius-dev?hl=en post: [email protected] unsubscribe: [email protected]
