JRuby and Sun

Sometimes, news happens when you're not there (even if you have a bit of forewarning. I spent yesterday up in the Wasatch Mountains doing maintenance work on a Camp for disabled youth as a part of the Salt Lake City United Way "Day of Caring" (2,600 volunteers from 96 companies worked on 110 projects — it was a great way to spend the day). The only down side was that I missed the news that Sun has hired Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo to work on JRuby full time (and flood of responses that engendered).

This is great news, and should spark a lot of activity in the Ruby world. Some of the things that I'm looking forward to include:

• More work on a formal specification for Ruby.
• More work on a common test suite for the Ruby interpreter, core libraries, and standard library.
• Increased visibility for Ruby as a whole.
• Some JRuby books (as a language hobbyist, I'd love to read "The Design and Implementation of JRuby"

I'm sure there will be some doom-sayers, and probably some rocky times ahead as the JRuby project and the C implementation of Ruby figure out their relationship, I'm confident though, that these will be mere bumps on the road to a bigger, more vibrant Ruby community and a faster, better tested set of Ruby implementations.

In case you missed it, I interviewed Charles and Thomas a while before this chage. You can read the interview here, with a couple of outtakes here and here.