Sun Backs Ruby by Hiring Main JRuby Developers

pate writes "Sun has thrown some corporate weight behind Ruby, Rails, and dynamic languages by hiring the two main JRuby developers, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo. Charles posted about jruby stepping into Sun on his blog, and Thomas posted his take too. Tim Bray, who started the ball rolling posted about the JRuby Love."

Support for Dynamic languages

[EqualSlash]

Long ago, Microsoft hired Jython creator Jim Hugunin to work on IronPython. The aim is to make dynamic languages like python work better in .NET platform. Looks like Sun doesn't want to lose out in the race in supporting dynamic languages.

Re:Support for Dynamic languages

[TheRaven64]

Smalltalk, the archetypal dynamic language, already runs quite happily on top of the JVM. Sun doesn't need better technology, they need better marketing. Last time I checked, there were more languages supported by the JVM than the .NET CLR, but Sun only ever talk about Java while Microsoft talk about everything. This is a PR move to let the world know that the JVM is not just for Java.

Re:Great News

[LarsWestergren]

If now, with .NET, this is the first time that Sun is thinking about adding other language compilers for their bytecode then they are way to late.

Two seconds of Googling could have told you that the JVM has supported more languages than .net [robert-tolksdorf.de] for a long time.

I don't think they will ever be able to top the .NET support already there. If they think this is competing with .NET, it's to little, to late.

You do know that Java is MUCH bigger than .Net out in the real world?

More probable: Sun is going to add Ruby on rails to their JSP system, which is probably the only way they kan add anything to anything.

You really have no idea what you are talking about. Java developers could use Ruby to do fast and easy unit tests for instance. The scripting sessions at the last JavaOne showed lots of other interesting uses. Also it wouldn't surprise me if one possible long time plan wouldn't be to make the JVM the fastest, most stable and therefore the most attractive platform to run all Ruby programs.

Re:Not exactly a good thing

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Think harder.

How about a bazillion prewritten, documented, tested, standardized, open source library modules, many of them supplied by Sun with the language, to do bigmath/network/file/database/sql/2D-3Dgraphic/GUI /whatnot ops?

Tell you what, you roll anything trickier than "hello world" from scratch in C/C++, and I'll do the same in Java, and we'll see who has the choice of more predefined stuff to use, and who finishes faster with a program that runs more correctly.

Re:GPL?

[mrjatsun]

OpenOffice is GPL. Different licenses for different products. There isn't one license to rule them all. I don't see why JRuby wouldn't be GPL given Sun's (my employer) past history.

Re:Great News

[masklinn]

Two seconds of Googling could have told you that the JVM has supported more languages than .net for a long time.

I may be overreaching here, but I think that part of his point was that Sun never ever officially endorsed any language but Java on the Java platform. Only now that MS has started championing a pretty much official IronPython effort has Sun discovered dynamic languages, and started working towards making the JVM more dynamic-languages friendly.

Which is a damn shame, because they had Jython years ago, which they could easily have supported at almost no cost, and they let the project die on it's own.

Re:The way I see things...

[masklinn]

I don't see anybody rushing to port this to run on the JVM/CLR, is this because the performance and memory use would absolutely suck?

I think it's because they don't go for the same market. Lua's goal is to be a fast, simple embedded language, to enable easy scripting of your C/C++ applications for example (which is why Lua is used a lot in embedded and games devs).

Python and Ruby are full fledged, self-contained programming languages (even though you can embed them into C/C++ programs, or use C/C++ libs from them). Porting them to the JVM or the CLR gives you all of the platform's power (modules & third party packages) with more dynamic and flexible syntaxes.

Lua is definitely not "unheard of" though.

Re:Support for Dynamic languages

[egghat]

This is a *good* PR move.

Which is not the norm when you're talking abount Sun microsoystems.

Bye egghat.

after letting Jython languish

[hashmap]

I gots no love for Sun ... after all Jython been out for half a decade, and Sun has shown little to no interest in it ... just imagine how much better it would be if they had the foresight to support it and improve its performance

As far as I'm concenrned Sun is playing catch-up with Microsoft, and this is no more than a half assed response to MS releasing IronPython

Re:Not exactly a good thing

[Grr]

Tell you what, you roll anything trickier than "hello world" from scratch in C/C++, and I'll do the same in Java, and we'll see who has the choice of more predefined stuff to use, and who finishes faster with a program that runs more correctly.

I pick a 3d shooter. Now you get to pick anything less yawn inspiring than a database driven office app right? This is a fun game. ;)

Seriously though, each language has applications that it's well or badly suited for. Each moderatly proficient software developer should be able to pick the right tools for the job and be able to use them. No need to start holy wars over them.

Re:Great News

[LarsWestergren]

The solution is YARV [...] Benchmarks show that it will be about as fast as Java and .NET in most situations. Slower in some situations, faster in some.

Yes, but the JVM is a moving target. By the time all those bugs have been ironed out, JRuby will have improved their execution speeds too. Lets not declare the winner until we have the finished products to compare, otherwise we are just playing the old Microsoft game of "lets compare the features of our future products with the features of our competition today".

Re:Great News

[recordMyRides]

Smalltalk was invented in Palo Alto, California. [wikipedia.org]

My opinion on why we don't use Smalltalk? When it came out, the world wasn't ready for it. We were still getting our heads around object oriented programming in general. The fact that it didn't use C syntax didn't help either. Smalltalk was just too much for most programmers to learn. Nowdays, since it is decades old, it doesn't have the same sparkle of a newer language, like Ruby.

Missing the point

[metamatic]

Ruby on Rails has got a lot of attention. Many web sites that would have been built using Java are being built using Rails, and people were starting to ask if Ruby on Rails was the new, better Java.

This is an insurance policy for Sun, and a way for them to provide a migration path and say "Oh, OK, you can run your Rails site on our Java platform while you build the next version using J2EE".