Disqus - Latest Comments for Charles O Nutter

Re: Dan Manges's Blog - The Power of Implementing Ruby in Ruby

Charles O Nutter — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 01:36:47 -0000

This isn't a factor of being implemented in Ruby; rather, it's a factor of having access to all internals as normal objects. And although MRI doesn't provide that capability, JRuby does:

<pre>
require 'java'
require 'jruby'

def examine(obj)
real = JRuby.reference(obj)
realclass = JRuby.reference(real.meta_class)
while realclass
p realclass
break unless realclass.super_class
realclass = JRuby.reference(realclass.super_class)
end
end

object = Class.new { def foo; 'foo from object'; end }.new
mixin = Module.new { def foo; 'foo from mixin'; end }

object.extend(mixin)
examine(object)
</pre>

In JRuby, as in Rubinius, all objects can be accessed as "just objects". So the same capabilities apply.

Re: Mix, JRuby on Rails, Small Teams, Agile, and it’s Effects on the World

Charles O Nutter — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 03:32:05 -0000

JRuby, not jRuby. Thanks for the kind words and congratulations on a great project. I agree the future is bright for JRuby. I hope we'll have opportunities to work together...in the open...in the future.

Re: Ruby one-liners get answered

Charles O Nutter — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 06:15:04 -0000

I like how three of the answers directly involve JRuby and a fourth (IDEs) indirectly involves JRuby (NetBeans and Eclipse Ruby support both use JRuby).

On a related note, I've been playing a bit with Rails 2.2, and it seems to be working great with only one JRuby process.

Re: IBM gets into the Rails game

Charles O Nutter — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 01:33:43 -0000

Very interesting...

Re: The power of JRuby

Charles O Nutter — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:55:06 -0000

I'm not sure why Groovy users feel it necessary to comment on every blog post where someone on the Java platform loves using JRuby. Guys, seriously, you don't need to chase JRuby users from one end of the world to the other trying to convert them. The Java platform is big enough for both languages to thrive, and both languages take a different approach to integrating with Java. Groovy's going to be good for some tasks and Ruby will be good for others. Some people will like Ruby and some people will like Groovy or Python or Scala or Clojure or what have you. There is no "best bet" for scripting on the Java platform. Can't you just leave people alone that like JRuby?

devdanke: Yes, the standard Ruby implementation has issues, but JRuby solves almost all of them. We're much faster, parallel-threaded, and obviously have access to many more libraries. Judging Ruby based on the C implementations is myopic at best...JRuby is very real and in many ways much better than those implementations. And we're continuing to improve how JRuby integrates with the rest of the Java platform. For the most part, the only major piece missing is being able to precompile Ruby code and reference it directly from Java, which is simply complicated by Ruby not having static type declarations like Java and Groovy do. This also opens up a lot of possibilities for Ruby code, since the type system is more fluid from the start. If you haven't tried JRuby, you really should; it integrates extremely well with Java today and will continue to improve. And almost all your concerns about the standard impls are not issues with JRuby.

Re: The power of JRuby

Charles O Nutter — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 07:35:02 -0000

Marc Palmer: I don't think devdanke's main point is unchallengeable at all. Sure, Ruby is a bit more different from Java, but idiomatic Groovy code that takes advantage of all Groovy's features ends up looking almost identical to Ruby. So as a stepping stone, Groovy holds a Java developer's hand more, but the feature set is almost as weird and wild as Ruby. Ultimately, though, this is a pointless debate; many people love Ruby specifically because it's *not* like Java, and many people are interested in Ruby's culture, Ruby's ecosystem, and Ruby itself simply because it suits them better. Groovy being "closer to Java" is a detriment in as many ways as it is a benefit.

And Ruby is not just "a way for Ruby coders to get onto the JVM". JRuby is a real, viable JVM scripting language in its own right, and we get as many users coming to JRuby from the Java world as we get from the Ruby world. Yes, many of our users have never used Java before, but many others are new to Ruby. And that's partially why we've stayed true to Ruby but also incorporated JVM and Java features where appropriate: we live in both worlds, and need to balance the needs of each.

Paul King: This was never a post trying to convert anyone or win users away from other JVM languages. Khaled was obviously just spelling out reasons why he likes JRuby, especially in preference to the C implementations. I find it extremely rude to hijack his post to beat the Groovy drum. Yes, Groovy is great, wonderful, amazing, spectacular...but why say so here? Why try to co-opt Khaled's enthusiasm to push Groovy? Khaled likes JRuby. Let him like JRuby without evangelising Groovy in comments on his post.