Ok, I’ve been sitting on some news for a while and it’s finally out in the open, so I guess I can talk about it.
Engine Yard has just snapped up some seriously big guns in the Ruby world. From my conversations with them, is sounds like they’ll be putting in time on Rubinius as well as other Ruby enhancing projects. Here’s what Ezra told me about it:
The big plan for rubinius is that we will be hiring a bunch more top guns to get rubinius production worthy. These folks include Wilson Bilkovitch, Josh Susser, Ryan Davis and Eric Hodel and Yehuda Katz. I can’t think of any better people to get rubinius to 1.0 and beyond and running fast.
Update: Josh Susser isn't going to work for Engine Yard as noted below. I'll add something in a bit to clear things up. He told me "I should point out that I'm not going to work at EY. I'm at Pivotal now, and happy that things worked out that way, and no hard feelings anywhere either. I'll still be contributing to Rubinius, but not as an EY employee.". Sorry to pass along dated/incorrect info.
Update Two: Evan Phoenix says "In addition to Ryan and Eric, Wilson Bilkovich and Brian Ford will be starting with EY to be paid to work on Rubinius in the January. Again, I’m so amazed and thrilled that EY is providing Rubinius with the funds to let these guys work on a project they love fulltime." Maybe this'll teach me not to use a quote I've been sitting on.
Some of this seems to have been an open secret at RubyConf, but with Eric Hodel’s recent post on the current Rubinius spring I think it’s time to celebrate.
Speaking of the sprint, I asked the hackers involved if they’d be willing to answer a couple of questions in between coding up new rubinius goodness. This is what they told me:
This sprint looks like a big deal. What do you hope will come from it?
Eric Hodel Pure awesome.
This one has been part organizational, setting up the details of EY employment, and half hacking on things such as the compiler and RubyGems.
Josh Susser I’ve been looking for a way to get more involved in Rubinius, so to me it’s been an opportunity to find an area where I can contribute that makes sense. I love doing VM work, but I’m not much of a C hacker, which is a little problem if you’re going to work on a VM that’s written in C. As it turns out, one of the goals for the project is to build a simulation of the VM in Ruby itself. This will be the seed of the eventual Squeakification1 of Rubinius, but in the near term it will help with understanding the operation of the C VM and doing experiments and explorations. If you hear the name Popgun somewhere, that’s the VM-in-Ruby simulator.
Brian Ford Lots of face-to-face time. The opportunity to work in person with folks and talk over process issues, brainstorm, pair, and socialize. We started off making a big and unrealistic but fun list of both serious and fun goals. As with most things, process will likely end up being much more important than the actual checklist of results.
Wilson Bilkovich For me it’s an opportunity to take a vacation from my ‘day job’ and get some actual Rubinius work done. I’ve had far too little time for that recently. We have a long list of sprint goals. Hopefully at least a couple of the major ones will get checked off.
What’s the best part of getting together for a sprint like this?
Brian Personalities. Some bits of technology can be inspiring, but I find people far more inspiring than most things.
Wilson Being able to siphon knowledge out of peoples’ heads at a much higher rate.
Eric Pairing. Having instant feedback for problems is unbeatable.
Also, Wilson and I added unit_diff support to mspec to aid testing of parts of the compiler.
Josh Aside from just getting to hang out with a lot of awesome guys, it’s a really different experience getting to talk in person about stuff. The IRC channel is okay, but it is so high-bandwidth that I have trouble keeping up. I get up to grab a drink and when I come back there are 300 new lines of stuff to catch up on. Also, mango lassis are yummy.
Are there going to be more Rubinius sprints? When, where, and what do you hope to accomplish in them?
Brian Certainly there will be more. The hope is to accomplish a ton of Rubinius development in the shortest time possible. A related goal is to reach out to other Ruby developers in a meaningful way so that their pain points using Ruby permeate our consciousness while we work to make Ruby better.
emacs vs vi? dvorak vs. qwerty?
Brian Textmate, emacs, vi, but I spend most time coding in Textmate. Qwerty, but I paired a bit with Nathan Sobo and he set me up with the input switcher, so now I have no excuse not to learn dvorak.
The first Rubinius specific project (other than Rubinius itself) was recently started at RubyForge. How big a milestone is this? What should we be seeing next from the Rubinius community?
Wilson Surreal.
Brian It is interesting from the perspective that it is a project just for Rubinius. But one of the goals of Rubinius is work wherever MRI works. So, that implies some sense of anonymity ( i.e. you should not even notice your program is running on Rubinius vs MRI). However, we do intend to use Rubinius as a platform to extend the state of the art of Ruby (e.g. with great concurrency primitives), so I fully expect to see new Rubyforge projects popping up that are Rubinius specific.
1 Squeak
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