reddit

“"Rubinius's case, he may have a point. [..]after a year of funding six developers it's still not really usable for real apps."

Yeah: doing infrastructure work is always a thankless job. You seem to forget what's come out of all this:
- RubySpec, the massive amount of executable specs that are now run by every Ruby implementation; this didn't exist before Rubinius.
- ruby_parser (finally a Ruby based Ruby parser, something beneficial for _every_ Ruby implementation, and a first step to wean IDEs off the JRuby AST dependency)
- ffi (which JRuby seems to be happy to adopt, but it originated in Rubinius)
- the initial MVM implementation;
- Rubinius Kernel and all the bits that'll allow to make Ruby go full turtle-on-turtle at some point;

And I'm sure I'm forgetting a few other things. So yeah, it took longer to get up to speed than expected, but in the process the Rubinius gang improved the Ruby and Ruby VM space significantly.


A last Nitpick: "Hotspot has its roots in the Smalltalk world":
Who gives a plonk? The thing was forked off the Strongtalk source, what, 10 years ago. All the dynamic goodness has been covered by a thick Java/JVM crust... and now it'll take a few years to knock holes in that to get back at the fancyness that made Strongtalk fast. If it's "the best available dynamic language VM"s, why is it fighting dynamic languages all the way? (no lightweight classes, no lightweight methods, Permgen/classloader blowups, etc). I can definitely appreciate the technical and pragmatic benefits of Hotspot (stable codegen backend, wealth of stable GCs,...), but that kind of hyperbole is best left to marketing bunnies.” source...