Sun Continues with Its Ruby Efforts despite Microsoft's Announcement

Filed in archive Application Development on October 27, 2006

JRuby 0.9.1 has been released by the JRuby team at Sun and now the efforts are being concentrated towards version 1.0. In September Sun had hired Thomas Enebo and Charles Nutter, chief maintainers of JRuby for implementing Ruby dynamic language on the Java Virtual Machine.

The next day of the release of JRuby 0.9.1, Microsoft made an announcement that it has got John Lam, a Ruby expert for implementing dynamic languages on the Microsoft Common Language Runtime.

Thomas Enebo stated:

This release of the platform has some significant improvements over previous releases, including that overall performance is 50 to 60 percent faster than JRuby 0.9.0. It also features improved Ruby on Rails support; new syntax for including Java classes into Ruby; a new interpreter design; refactoring of method dispatch, code evaluation and block dispatch code; parser performance enhancement; rewriting of Enumerable and StringScanner in Java; new experimental syntax for implementing interfaces; and 86 Jira bug issues resolved since 0.9.0

Sun is moving towards JRuby version 1.0 whereas Microsoft has already released IronPython 1.0 which is the implementation of Python on .Net. With Lam in Microsoft's kitty expect something from Microsoft's stable in coming months. It seems that Sun and Microsoft are getting head on head in the JRuby race.