I can't remember where I saw it (pypy dev list maybe?) but unfortunately I think the project has been mostly abandoned. Wouldn't hurt for someone to fork it though, it seems like a great idea if someone had the time to move it forward.
That's only 6 months. I don't know if I'd call an obvious research project like this "dead" after that time period. I think there's a difference between "dead" and "not exceptionally active". And I don't think that not being exceptionally active necessarily means anything for the quality of the software; people continue actively use a lot of software that hasn't seen a single patch in years.
Do you think they wouldn't take contributions? The licensing is such that if it's really a great project, then even if it were completely abandoned, it would be no big deal to fork it in order to continue development.
If it's not so great, of course, it doesn't matter if it's active.
Is anyone running JRuby in production for anything?
Every time I tried it out so far it turned out slower than MRI for me. Perhaps I was always hitting on pathological cases, though (tight data processing loops).
Don't have a citation for this, but I recall hearing that Square runs JRuby in production.
Separately, the start time makes JRuby awful for TDD/Dev, but once it has time to warm up in production it is vastly faster. Scan back through some Ruby Rogues episodes, they discuss it a few times in more detail.
Did you do a FOSDEM talk? Looks like it. Great talk, and great work.
Truffle is great, but strangely its documentation is spread all over the Web, one piece on java.net, another on github/jruby's wiki, yet another on uni-linz.ac.at... How does the team work?
JRuby+Truffle is funded by Oracle Labs. There's two full-time employees on it, a PhD student at Linz, and many other people who contribute occasionally or work on libraries we use. Yeah, two of us were at FOSEM. We all work remotely around the world.
The documentation is a bit all over the place at the moment, reflecting the different aspects of the project - part academic/industrial research collaboration, part open source product development. We're not trying to get anyone to use it yet, which is why there isn't a single coherent flashy landing page, but we'll get to that in time.
How far off do you think that might be? The benchmarks are appealing and the optimizations seem like a no brainer (I know easier said than done). What holds this back from being production ready, more Rspec?
Off topic now but Truffle looks slightly more interesting than Topaz.
We have to implement the rest of the core library, and we have to implement a lot of the standard library as well. That's a huge task with thousands of methods, but we're using the code from Rubinius for a lot of it and making good progress, so we hope to be able to run some of the simpler web frameworks by RubyConf this year. It may be another year beyond that before I recommend anyone uses it, or it may be sooner.
http://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/fast_enough_vms_in_fast...