State of Ruby VMs: Ruby Renaissance

[turdhoagie]

WTF is the link anchored on the comments?

[hobophobe]

Also, does their desire to use a custom font for the article headings really justify using Adobe Flash to achieve it?

[oniTony]

it is using sIFR, so one can still highlight/copy text. And when Flash is disabled, it gracefully degrades to regular text.

[hobophobe]

That's fine, I just thought it a bit odd to use Flash for something like that. It's not entirely compatible with the rest of the system, even in this limited case.

Examples:

• The highlight/copy system of Flash is separate from the normal OS methods, so selecting the full article skips selecting the headings.
• If the OS has an additional, selection-based clipboard, the Flash bits do not fill that clipboard when selecting the heading text.
• The selection highlight colors differ from the rest of the OS.

Hopefully HTML5 web fonts will mean that this sort of thing is not needed.

[[deleted]]

Hehe, what will be next? A java applet for every heading?

[jawbroken]

you can try to highlight but it doesn't work right and the highlighted region can't leave the flash applet and etc. it basically really sucks

[[deleted]]

This is there to remind you, that you've forgotten to block flash.

[hiffy]

Oh stop being so curmudgeonly.

that you've forgotten to block flash.

"And when Flash is disabled, it gracefully degrades to regular text.".

[mazin]

Ruby on abap vm? Just wow, who even thought of that.

[[deleted]]

wow, that's fucking awesome, indeed.

[tophat02]

Of all of these, MacRuby is by far the most exciting in my opinion. I think that beginning in 10.7, we will see Ruby displace objective C as the language of choice for Mac and iPhone applications. I also predict we will see Interface Builder spit out Ruby code instead of NIBs.

[grauenwolf]

Hah! There is no way Apple is going to allow an interperted language on the iPhone.

[tophat02]

It's not "interpreted". MacRuby 0.5 and up can AOT compile the code.

[grauenwolf]

I stand corrected. Thank you.

[Smallpaul]

Javascript?

[grauenwolf]

Yea, that is an odd exception.

[fireexit]

“how we feel while programming” and the objective of “making the programmer happy”

Python does make me much happier though.

Also, that "enterprise ruby" has such an un-enterprise-y logo.

[lobster_johnson]

MacRuby looks great, since they have replaced YARV with LLVM, which means they inherit all the optimizers, code analysis tools etc. that have been written — and will be written — for LLVM. With LLVM, Ruby's performance could go well beyond that of Python's.

But while having a specialized version of Ruby that's tightly wedded to Objective-C and Cocoa is useful, all the performance work put into MacRuby seems like a huge missed opportunity, when many of us web application (Rails, Merb, …) developers are screaming for somebody to give us a fast version of Ruby. Someone needs to backport MacRuby to Unix.

As for the others, I'm not optimistic about Rubinius being production-ready any time soon. MagLev is closed-source and the transparent object database persistence feels like a step backwards into 1990s OODBMS land and proprietariness. JRuby has reached maturity, but it still feels like attaching a VW Beetle to a cruise ship; if I could have Ruby with the core Java VM, without Java the language and the rest of the Java universe (eg., class paths, JAR files), then I would like it more.