This talk was a good time. Evan started out by stating that the goal of everyone here is total world domination… for ruby. JRuby, IronRuby, Rubinius, MRI, etc. all share the same goal of increasing the use and acceptance of Ruby as a language. He then went on to ruffle some feathers and compare the number of lines of code in the runtime and kernel of the various platforms. MRI is basically all C, JRuby is basically all Java, IronRuby is basically all C#. Rubinius is the only one that includes a significant portion in Ruby. (I forget the exact metrics) The point he is trying to make is that Rubinius is for Ruby developers and should make it easy for any Ruby developer to contribute to the real language.
Another interesting part of the talk is where Evan talks about how if you submit a patch to Rubinius and that patch is accepted then you are promoted to a commiter. That’s pretty impressive and an interesting approach which he says has been a success so far.
Projects like this make me very optimistic about the future of Ruby and the Ruby community. The equivalent in the .NET world would be if someone decided to write their own CLR using as much C# as possible and making it open source. Not to make it run on another platform (like Mono) but just to make it more accessible and available.
-James
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