This is a dream project, and turns out to be pretty darn hard and a lot of work. I’ve made the mistake in the past about talking about when I think that we’ll release 1.0. Something I don’t think I properly understood a year ago was the level that people are looking for a 1.0 to operate at. If we released a 1.0 that was 10x slower than MRI, we’d probably be in pretty tough shape.

At the some time, I know people want to play with Rubinius. We fell off doing monthly releases a while back, and we’re going to start getting back on that soon. Hopefully that will give people insight into the project’s progress more.

We’re still hard at work, currently getting the new C++ VM into shape. This new C++ VM fixes a lot of fundamental problems the shotgun VM had (type safety, expression ordering, etc), which is a major reason we’re migrating our work to it.

Man it seems like yesterday that Engine Yard was a small 3 person startup with big ideas and little cash. People seemed to like what we were offering and the business grew into a thriving startup.

In the beginning we only had plans to be the best fully managed rails/ruby hosting company. And I think we met this goal early on. But it became apparent that we had a strong brand and we started kicking around ideas of becoming an open source software company as well.

We believe in Ruby as a platform, and we’ve put our money where our mouth is when we sponsored Rubinius and Merb, hiring many developers to work on both projects.

Engine Yard Closes $15 Million in Series B Financing

The new funding will help Engine Yard accelerate its business, bolster R&D of their forthcoming cloud computing cluster platform, and continue to drive innovation with its Ruby open-source projects, Rubinius and Merb.

Chris Matthieu and Steven Bristol interviewed Ezra Zygmuntowicz, the co-founder of Engine Yard! This 1 hour and 20 minute interview goes deep inside Ezra’s mind. We covered his early programming days where he almost selected Python instead of Ruby but then came to his senses. We also discussed the early days of Engine Yard as well as the present infrastructure and the totally awesome new projects including: MERB, Rubinius, and Vertebra. Ezra is a really cool thought-leader in the Ruby/Rails community. Engine Yard is an incredibly innovative, business-class Rails hosting service with the ability to scale. My apologies in advance for some of the VoIP R2D2 experienced during this recording. The content is well worth it!

And in other amazingly beautiful news, Rails runs on Rubinius as of last night! A huge round of applause for Evan, Wilson, Brian, Ryan, Eric and Eero, the rubinius core team and also to all 150 rubinius contributors. This is a huge milestone for the project. Being able to run rails, which is one of the largest and most complex ruby programs out there is huge. This means that rubinius is now ruby compatible for the most part. Now the team can start to steer their focus on speed improvements like JIT , polymorphic inline caching, LLVM and various other techniques for making rbx smoking fast.

Last night, the Rubinius team reached a major milestone!

Rubinius can now start Rails and serve static and dynamic requests.

This is one of the primary tests of a Ruby implementation, because the Rails code base is large and complex and uses many complex Ruby language features.

Another recent development has been a regular meeting of folks working on various Ruby implementations. These Ruby design meetings are bringing together folks to discuss tough issues with Matz and everyone else.

Well, after last night’s meeting, Tanaka Akira (sorry, I don’t have a link to his website; if you do, please let me know) checked in some changes to the ruby-core Makefile to fetch and run the RubySpecs. This is a very proud moment for me.

If you love Ruby, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you wear, what language you play with, or what country you live in. You can play a valuable role in helping make Ruby a wonderful language for everyone. Please help us with the RubySpecs.

Check out the bottom of the MRI 1.8 Makefile:

http://svn.ruby-lang.org/repos/ruby/branches/ruby_1_8/Makefile.in

Now that we have working OpenSSL support, we can run Merb:

fastness → merbinius -a webrick
~ Loaded DEVELOPMENT Environment...
~ Compiling routes...
~ Using 'share-nothing' cookie sessions (4kb limit per client)
~ Using Webrick adapter
~ WEBrick 1.3.1
~ ruby 1.8.6 (05/07/2008) [i686-apple-darwin9.2.2]
~ TCPServer.new(0.0.0.0, 4000)
~ Rack::Handler::WEBrick is mounted on /.
~ WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=61939 port=4000
~ accept: 127.0.0.1:59883
~ Rack::Handler::WEBrick is invoked.
~ Request:
~ Routed to: {:action=>"index", :controller=>"hello"}
~ Params: {"action"=>"index", "controller"=>"hello"}
~ {:after_filters_time=>1.8e-05, :before_filters_time=>3.1e-05,
  :dispatch_time=>0.069112, :action_time=>0.068106}