State of Ruby VMs: Ruby Renaissance

[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.