Engine Yard Expands Support For Rubinius

I am very pleased to announce that Engine Yard is sponsoring Dirkjan Bussink of Critical Codes to work on Rubinius.

Engine Yard has been a generous supporter of open source Ruby projects, including multiple Ruby implementations and Ruby on Rails, for many years. Indeed, they originally hired Evan Phoenix, the creator of Rubinius, in 2007, and have sponsored my work on Rubinius since 2008. Their sponsorship improves all aspects of the Ruby community, for developers writing Ruby code and for people everywhere who use applications written in Ruby or Rails. I’d like to thank Engine Yard for making Ruby and other open source technologies better for everyone.

Dirkjan has been a contributor to numerous open source projects, and to Rubinius in particular, for many years. He is eager, helpful and all around a joy to work with. We are lucky to have him helping with Rubinius.

With the accolades and appreciation dispensed, I’d like to cover some of what is coming for Rubinius.

Rubinius is an implementation of Ruby. At present, it supports 1.8.7 and 1.9.3 language modes, with support for Ruby 2.0 coming soon. Rubinius is a drop-in replacement for MRI (Matz’s Ruby Implementation), including support for C-extensions. Rubinius includes a modern, generational garbage collector, just-in-time compiler to native code using LLVM, and full support for multi-core and multi-CPU hardware with no global interpreter lock.

We are working toward the 2.0 final release for Rubinius. Dirkjan recently visited the Engine Yard office in Portland, OR for a week so we could talk about current and future development in person. I blogged summaries of our discussions: Welcome Dirkjan! and PDX Summit Recap. If you are interested in technical aspects of Rubinius, please see those posts.

Rubinius is available as an Early Access feature in Engine Yard Cloud. If you are currently using Engine Yard Cloud and are interested in learning more about how Rubinius may benefit you, please contact us. There are professional services available to help evaluate the benefits of Rubinius. Engine Yard also offers a free trial if you are not currently using Cloud. We are also working on Rubinius support in other platforms. Dirkjan is available to contract to assist evaluating and migrating to Rubinius.

The future is concurrent. We see this every day with industry’s use of technologies like Erlang, Clojure, and Node.js. Rubinius has been built from the beginning to bring Ruby into this concurrent world.

We will be writing more about the technology in Rubinius in the coming weeks. In the meantime, try your application, library, or gem on Rubinius. And don’t forget to test on Rubinius on Travis CI. That provides us invaluable feedback. If you have a moment, drop by our #rubinius IRC channel and say hello to Dirkjan.