04 11 / 2007
Rubinius For Ruby Developers
At Ruby Conf 07, Evan Phoenix the project lead for rubini.us gave a great talk about rubini.us vm. The key takeaway for myself, was ability to contribute to the language using the language itself.
What an obvious concept right? Use Ruby to make Ruby. Unfortunately this has not been the case with any implementation the Matz Ruby Implementation(MRI), JRuby, or Iron Ruby using C, Java, and C#, respectively. Most languages need a way to bootstrap itself, but MRI has still not shed it’s shackles of it’s C implementation.
Another concept, that this project has pushed forward with, is that the language should have an executable spec (using a rspec compatible suite). Now if certain aspects of the language seem to behave in a peculiar way, you can now look up the spec and see if ruby code is producing the desired behavior. This will hopefully drive an increase in development towards Ruby.
An aside, while at tbe conference there was a push to define the specification. Even while, most of the core ruby developers are Japanese with limited English.
