IronRuby, Sun, and Lang.net

Ruby was well represented at Lang.net this year, with Charlie Nutter of JRuby, Wayne Kelly of Ruby.net and myself all giving talks.

It was great having the folks from Sun there as well, with John Rose, Charlie Nutter, and Dan Ingalls all giving interesting talks. John Rose talked about his DaVinci Machine effort to make dynamic languages run better on the JVM. Dan talked about reinventing Smalltalk in the guise of JavaScript via his Lively Kernel project. Charlie Nutter talked about the more challenging aspects of implementing JRuby.

Charlie and John did their best to keep me up to the wee hours of the morning the night before my talk. But at 9am the next morning, I managed to deliver my talk on IronRuby. It was mostly a status update on where we are today, and how we plan to get to 1.0. First, we have debugging and stack backtraces working. This was a long time coming, and it makes life much easier for folks who are building the libraries. This feature lives only in a shelveset at the moment. It’s going to take some work before we’re ready to integrate it into the tree.

Next, we showed an update of where we are in running the Rubinius spec suite. At Lang.net, we were passing 57% of the Rubinius specs (1418 out of 2505). Note that not all specs are enabled right now, but most are.

Finally, we talked about how we are going to get to 1.0. Right now we’re going to switch to a goal-driven development process. Our next goal is to get ‘gem install hoe’ working. The Rakefile contains a task called ‘gap’, which lets you perform a gap analysis against a target application via the set_trace_proc interpreter hook.

We have folks who have signed up to get both YAML and Regex up and running. Once these two libraries are functional, we’ll be much farther along towards getting gem install to work.

We also want to use the gap analysis tool as a way of automatically publishing progress from our build system. Look for a site that will boil down progress towards a goal in terms of ‘n more methods to implement’, along with a list of those methods.

You can download my slide deck from here.

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I’m a fan of the writings of Rands In Repose. If you have a significant other, you must get them to spend some time reading his most excellent The Nerd Handbook. They’ll understand you much better after that!