Tab Sweep

Inspired by Tim Bray's periodic tab sweeps (Tim, do you collect unread tabs into the dozens like I do?) here's the first of hopefully many tab sweeps from me.

Kindle by Amazon - I've been waiting for an ePaper-based reader, but I don't think this is going to be the one. No cables or syncing? That says to me everything I read has to go through Amazon, and my existing PDFs will be worthless. Black and white. Ugly as sin ("Hello 1996? I found something that belongs to you"). Flop.

Neal Ford on JRuby and Ruby versus others (podcast) - Neal does a great job explaining JRuby to the masses while understanding the deeper reasons why it's one of the better languages for the JVM. One note to Neal: JRuby is far from being a simple port of the MRI C code; it's grown far, far beyond that now and is considerably more advanced in design and implementation.

Tim Bray's two-question Ruby tools survey - Tim's pretty good at keeping his finger on the pulse of the dev community. Guess that's why he's a director and distinguished engineer.

John Rose's report on his and my meeting with the PyPy team - John summed it up pretty well, but he's interested for different reasons than I. He's interested in finding ways to evolve the JVM to support the sorts of optimizations the PyPy JIT is performing (or will perform, where it's not complete yet). I'm interested in the possibility of a generic language toolchain that allows you to build your language of choice in a subset of your language of choice; effectively a way to quickly bootstrap a language's most rabid users directly into the implementation process, rather than forcing them to use a new language like Java or C#. If it can be done, my money's on that approach beating all "Language Runtimes" that saddle implementers with exactly the sorts of languages they don't want to use.

Glimmer - Despite sharing its name with the ill-fated Whitney Houston movie, Glimmer appears to be an interesting yet-another-JRuby-GUI-framework based on SWT and data binding. Is it obvious yet that GUI development in the C Ruby world is sorely lacking?

Greg Haygood mixes traditional JSP webapp and Rails in the same WAR - Perfectly valid. Now to start blurring the lines between JRuby on Rails and the various Java web frameworks and technologies.

Oracle Mix, the first big-time public JRuby on Rails site - A top-level oracle.com site running JRuby on Rails. That's hardcore. And I don't think they're even running JRuby 1.1, with all its performance glory. And I know about upcoming sites you don't. Future is bright.

David Bock with another OS X Java rant - But he's right about one thing...until Java 6 comes out on OS X, JRuby users will have to be content running the slower Java 5 or the somewhat-flaky Java 6 developer preview (no longer available for download). Write your congressman.

Tor Norbye's NetBeans Ruby features for last week - The guy's a machine. Awesome stuff, and more to come.

JRuby CafePress Store - Any proceeds will go...somewhere, I dunno. I just put it up because I got tired of people whining that they wanted JRuby t-shirts. I didn't bump up any prices, so who knows if there will even be any profit from them. If there is, I'll leave it be until there's something to use it for. If not, so be it. BTW: Don't get the logo on a black shirt; it won't look right.

Experiments with frameless execution - (site is down at the moment; try later) JRuby, like many other language implementations on general-purpose VMs, suffers from the overhead of heap-allocated "frame objects" that hold information about the current method call. They're needed because various languages often need per-call information on an easily accessible stack, or need to be able to tuck call frames away for future use (in closures, for example). They're overhead because the JVM already is allocating (and frequently optimizing away) call frames for the underlying Java code, and there's no way to get at those frames or overload them with new duties. IronPython is a notable example of a language impl that has opted to avoid frame objects, at the cost of some Python features. JRuby, in an effort to support all Ruby features, still has frame objects; but it may be possible to optimize them away in certain cases. The link has microbenchmark numbers for framed and frameless execution. Both are faster than Ruby 1.9; frameless by several times.

Paul Brannan's Ludicrous JIT compiler for Ruby - Promising work, and it gets some decent gains over Ruby 1.9.