How Many Rubies Does the Future Hold?
Nick Sieger, winner of the award for best note-taking at RubyConf 2006, gives us the best summary of Ruby’s future, in terms of platforms: “There are now at least 8 active implementations of Ruby (Ruby, Yarv, JRuby, Cardinal, Rubinius, MetaRuby, Ruby.NET, IronRuby), and two interop bridges (RubyCLR and RubyCocoa)! The biggest news was that there are plans to revive the Ruby testing project (formerly the Rubicon) and share as many tests as possible among the implementations.” As covered by Pat Eyler and Tim Bray, this year’s RubyConf featured an implementor’s summit, where leaders of all of the projects mentioned above got together to discuss Ruby’s future (and make decisions about it). In Tim’s words, “with all these alternate-implemenation projects under way, I’d say Ruby’s bets are pretty well hedged.” However, not everyone was quite so optimistic. In The Impending Ruby Fracture, blogger David Pollack captures the sense of anxiety that at least some members of the community feel abou
