Why would respect for the MRI devs stop you from publishing benchmarks? It's not an insult to say that something else is faster. I'd imagine the competition might drive them to improve if at all possible.
I feel like the MRI devs get beat on a bit too much, and they're doing the best job possible with very few paid developers. I'm more interested in showing how JRuby is improving over time than rubbing salt in the wounds.
Speaking of very few paid MRI developers, does anyone know if the Ruby project takes donations to hire full-time paid developers? If yes, could you please point us to the donations page?
After matz announced he was hired by Heroku I spoke with him on how he plans to hire developers. He doesn't want one company to have all the MRI developers, so the best way to create a new paid MRI committer is to hire one specifically to do so.
Really glad that @headius is getting some recognition for his dogged work in this space. I know he's been up against a sometimes quite hostile Ruby crowd but has remained a gentleman throughout.
I'm not really familiar with the ruby development process and community and haven't used the language much, but I could imagine the MRI developers spend considerable time advancing the actual design of the language (syntax, standard APIs, etc.) whereas the other Ruby implementations "only" need to implement that design and thus can maybe focus more on performance. If MRI were to die, that design work would still need to be done in order to push the language forward. As such it could be seen as a symbiotic relationship, not competition.
Yes, I'd say that's at least partially true. The innovation on JRuby's side is in new ways to integrate with the JVM, rather than in API or language design. MRI folks need to innovate both in how they design the language and APIs and in how they implement them.
