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Ruby – Past, Present, Future

Adam Fine

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Birth

February 24, 1993 1st release December 1995 Yukihiro Matsumoto (''Matz'')

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Influences

Lisp Smalltalk Perl

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Lisp – everything is an expression Smalltalk – everything is an object Perl – everything should be possible

Fundamentals

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Characteristics

Dynamic Reflective High level Multi-paradigm Feature-full (closures, continuations) Portable

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Implementation

Single pass C interpreter Written by a small group of volunteers Led by Yukihiro Matsumoto

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Progression

Gain popularity throughout Japan 1999: Ruby overtakes Python's mindshare in Japan Thriving Japanese community But no English docs Very few users outside Japan

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2000

Ruby starts spreading outside Japan Pragmatic Programmers: Dave Thomas and Andy

Hunt 2001: ''Programming Ruby'' (the PickAxe) - first

major documentation in English Documents Ruby 1.6

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Just Yesterday

Mainly used for high-level scripting and web Many interesting Web ideas and approaches: Borges, Wee, Iowa, Cerise, cgikit, mod_ruby

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Ruby 1.8

Released August 4th 2003 Language cleanup, less Perlish Implementation improvements

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Rails

Released July 2004 David Heinemeier Hansson chose Ruby Very small codebase A lot of functionality Attracts major attention

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Today

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1.8, 1.9, 2.0

1.8: Production branch 1.9: Development, experimental branch 2.0: What 1.9 will mature into YARV

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YARV

Lead Developer Koichi Sasada December 31, 2006: merged into the Ruby

repository Bytecode-compiled

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Rubinius

Modelled after the Smalltalk-80 virtual machine Transparent Highly reflective Self-hosting, self-extensible Optimizable

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JRuby

Platform: the JVM A working interpreter, compiler in the works Better performance than MRI (CRuby) Integrates with Java Benefits from the Java codebase

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The DLR and IronRuby

Platform: the CLR Optimized compilation, significant performance

gains But currently vaporware Doubts about extent of dynamic feature support

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XRuby

Platform: the JVM Compiles to JVM bytecode Performance currently better than the JRuby

interpreter Integration with the Java codebase Rails by the end of the year?

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The Future

The Rails benchmark Ruby 2.0: re-design vs. backward compatibility New implementations, new ideas, new applications

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Thank you for listening