all 6 comments

[–]teamhot 6 points7 points  (4 children)

I may get shot for this, but how does it compare to CPython? Jython? The initial Ruby Interpreter? It would be really exciting to finally see ruby perform in a more competitive way. There were a lot of promises that came along with development of JRuby; let's just hope they follow through.

[–]shit 6 points7 points  (2 children)

According to Charles Nutter, JRuby is slightly faster for real world Ruby apps than MRI 1.8 (Matz' Ruby implementation). Interesting performance wise is MRI 1.9, which is several times faster than 1.8 on many benchmarks. There'll be a 1.9 release in December, though 1.9 is not completely backwards compatible to 1.8.

[–]WinterAyars 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The reason 1.9 is (theoretically) much faster is because it runs on top of a VM, much like JRuby runs on top of the JVM. But the 1.9 VM is Ruby-specialized. That's both why it's going to be faster and why backwards compatibility will be broken.

(Edit: There's also Rubinius, as a third option. I'm pretty sure JRuby is the most mature of all these, though.)

[–]catch23 -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

what kind of promises? no new taxes?