JRuby is a great implementation of the language.
I've used it for a couple of hobby projects and like what I see, though I
certainly wouldn't class myself an expert :)
I also follow the jvm-l list and empathise with some of the pain that the VM
has given you...
I think dynamic typing is the biggest hurdle. I have to compensate for this
with a lot of extra unit tests and I also find it can also cause subtle
problems.
Can't say I've seen it in Ruby, but one of my experiences with JavaScript is
the "a - (- b)" notation to guarantee that you're adding numbers instead of
concatenating strings.
Other features I'd miss are pattern matching and lazy vals, both of which
are invaluable to functional programming. I know these are available to a
certain extent via Gems, but pattern matching isn't so useful unless all
the other libraries I use are also written using case classes so they can
take advantage of it. Then there's the risk of Gems using native code (and
so won't run on JRuby).
The only other problem is the risks of monkey patching. Although this tends
to get over-played quite a lot, and certainly isn't something that would
turn me away from a language I otherwise liked.
On 12 September 2010 07:19, Charles Oliver Nutter <head...@headius.com>wrote:
> On Sep 9, 11:17 pm, Sean Griffin <trenchgui...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > My intention is not as sensational as my subject, but it's succinct so
> > I'll go with it.
>
> FWIW, I'm surprised JRuby doesn't come up more. Perhaps people don't
> think about it because they feel Ruby is a "non-JVM" language more
> than a JVM language?
>
> Ruby the language (not necessarily on JRuby) likely has more users
> worldwide than Groovy, Scala, and Clojure combined. By conservative
> estimates there are 500k-1M folks using Ruby. There are dozens of Ruby
> conferences around the world; I'll be attending 6 total this fall in
> the US, Japan, Brazil, and Uruguay, and more this spring in Europe and
> India. So it can't be that there's not a community to support it.
>
> JRuby itself has defeated the idea that "Ruby is slow" already, and in
> the next release Ruby performance for many things will start to
> approach Java...even without requiring static types and other dynlang"
> impurities. For small benchmarks, JRuby master has exceeded the
> performance of all other dynamic languages on the JVM already.
>
> JRuby integrates very well with Java, implementing interfaces (at
> runtime or ahead-of-time), extending classes, and of course calling
> any Java class as if it were just another Ruby class. The vast
> majority of integration cases work just fine, and most folks that
> choose JRuby do so explicitly because it integrates so well.
>
> I suppose the big reason people may not consider Ruby is due to the
> differing syntax and some oddities in the language? I don't find the
> syntax that far off from Java...mostly it's replacing {} with
> do...end, using @foo for instance variables, and omitting visibility
> modifiers. So I think this is a red herring too.
>
> I'd like to hear why nobody on this thread has even mentioned JRuby,
> especially if it's something we've failed to do in the implementation
> that keeps people away.
>
> - Charlie
>
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