On Monday evening, the various Ruby implementers (sans John Lam since he had a schedule conflict) got together on FreeNode IRC in #ruby-core to discuss various design and future-related agenda items.
Here's the agenda and IRC log, and here's a rundown of what was discussed...

In this post, Glen Stampoultzis posts a very interesting and clever sequence of steps by which he converts a piece of Java code into idiomatic Groovy code. I thought it was a nice article, so I'll do a very short spin on it: taking Glen's final Groovy code and converting...

I'm very tired. I've been in the EU since last week Wednesday, first at Euruko in Prague, then getting slides ready for Scotland on Rails, and finally preparing a release announcement with Tom today. It's been a very long 11 days. So here's some quick hits for you.
EuRuKo FTW...

One of the big reasons people have been interested in JRuby lately is because it is currently the only Ruby implementation that can both host multiple instances in a single process and run threads *actually* in parallel. Ruby 1.8 is entirely green-threaded. Rubinius has support for multiple parallel in-process VMs,...

Late last week I wired up a quick proof-of-concept C back-end for Duby, to show that it is possible. Duby's design represents all types as symbols, which allows the type representation to vary across platforms. So in fib(), the fixnum type is represented as ":fixnum" throughout, and it can be...

Akira Tanaka just did a lightning talk on IO.copy_stream, a new method added to Ruby 1.9 last night that does a fast stream transfer all in C code, avoiding the intermediate strings. It's a good idea, one I hope takes hold for other IO operations that could use some native...

It's been...oh my, almost two weeks since I broke the news about Duby. Since then I attended PyCon and we managed to get JRuby 1.1 RC3 out the door, which is looking like it will become JRuby 1.1 final. But I've still been working on Duby in my spare time...

We were just discussing GSoC a bit, and another idea occurred to me:
Survey existing language implementations and how they're solving similar problems like POSIX, code generation/compilation, parsing, and so on, and work with project leads to pull out common solutions into reusable APIs.This would be a huge help to...

It's been one of those nights, my friends! An outstanding night!
All day Sunday I had the stupids. It was probably related to a few beers on Saturday night, or the couple glasses of red wine before that. Whatever it was, I didn't trust myself to work on any JRuby...

With JRuby 1.1 approaching, performance looking great, and general Ruby compatibility better than its ever been, we've started to branch out into more libraries and applications. So a couple days ago, I thought I'd make good on a promise to myself and have a look at getting RubyInline working on...

Upcoming event round-up!
Next weekend, Tom Enebo, Nick Sieger and I will be at PyCon, checking out all the pythony goodness and hooking up with the Jython guys for some hacking.Tom and I will travel to Prague for Euruko 2008, the European RubyConf. We'll present JRuby, unsurprisingly, and hopefully meet...

Today we can finally announce another exciting language-related event: we've hired Frank Wierzbicki of the Jython project and Ted Leung of OSAF (and a bunch of other stuff) to help with the Python story at Sun. Hooray!
Frank Wierzbicki has been tirelessly plodding away on Jython for years, since the...

Finally the full announcement is available. We're pretty excited about this one...
The University of Tokyo and Sun Microsystems Commence Joint Research Projects on High Performance Computing and Web-based Programming Languages...

Greetings!
Google's Summer of Code for 2008 is starting up again, and we're looking for folks to submit proposals. The JRuby Community or Sun or me or someone will sign up as a mentoring organization, so start thinking about or discussing possible proposals. Here's a few ideas to get you...

(NOTE: Due to an issue migrating my blog from one Google account to another, this URL now points at a *copy* of the original post. If you would like to add further comments, please do so there.)
I'm taking a break from some bug fixing to bring you this public...

I'm taking a break from some bug fixing to bring you this public service announcement:
Ruby's Thread#raise, Thread#kill, and the timeout.rb standard library based on them are inherently broken and should not be used for any purpose. And by extension, net/protocol.rb and all the net/* libraries that use timeout.rb are...

It's 5am in Brussels and I'm awake. That can only mean one thing. Time to blog!
This weekend I'm presenting JRuby at FOSDEM, the "Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting." I was invited to talk, and who could pass up an invitation to Belgium?...

Today, Tom got the JRuby 1.1 RC2 release out. It's an astounding collection of performance improvements and compatibility fixes. Here's Tom's JRuby 1.1 RC2 announcement.
Let's recap a little bit:There have been additional performance improvements in RC2 over RC1. Long story short, performance of most trivial numeric benchmarks approaches or...

Yes friends, I'm at Microsoft's Lang.NET symposium this week. Does this strike you as a bit peculiar?
Lang.NET is Microsoft's event for folks interested in using and implementing "alternative" languages on the CLR. From the Lang.NET site itself:Lang .NET 2008 Symposium is a forum for discussion on programming languages, managed...

Well it's been a long hard slog for the Jython team. Once thought dead, they seemed to pick up steam more and more over the past year. They got out a long awaited 2.2 release and started to work on many missing 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5 features. They started tackling...