Bad News From the Rubinius Team

Yesterday, Evan Phoenix broke the news that Engine Yard has scaled back their Rubinius team to two members. This means a number of formerly employed Rubinius hackers are now going to be looking for work. Developments like this are never good news. It's certainly not the end of the world though. I'm grateful for Engine Yard's support, but I think it's important that we not tie Rubinius to Engine Yard. In addition to their work, there have been huge contributions made by unpaid Rubinius volunteers, part-timers (including multiple GSoC projects), and other companies. Some of the most important work has been the cooperation of multiple projects on common goals like the test suite. Engine Yard has poured a good chunk of resources into Rubinius over the last year or so, and has that investment has paid off in a better, faster, more complete Rubinius (see Tom Mornini's blog post for some details). In fact, they hired more engineers to work on Rubinius than Sun did to work on JRuby. Thanks, Engine Yard, for the contribution to a thriving Ruby community. Good luck in navigating the difficult economic times we're all facing. And good luck to the great hackers who are now looking for a soft landing — if any of you have some Ruby work that you could send their way, I'm sure it would be appreciated. [Note, while Engine Yard sponsors my blog they were not involved in writing the entry.]