Current JRuby status - AKA The what's-cool-and-happening

This is just a small update on what's going on in JRuby development at the moment. The first and most important item is that Tom has merged his block-work to trunk. He has done a monumental achievement with a patch on over 17k lines. The most amazing thing is that my main test case for block problems (Camping) runs perfectly. Tom also reports some performance improvements, but that isn't the important thing. What this block patch is all about is to remove the block stacks from our ThreadContext, and instead just pass the current block along through the Java stack (in other words, as a parameter to the method call in question). This simplifies many things and also make it possible for our compiler to finally compile closures and blocks. Charles will soon continue the work on making this happening, but being able to do that means the JIT will work for vastly more of the code than it does at the moment.

The second work we're hard at right now is Rails compatibility. Tom is looking at ActiveRecord, Charles have improved Marshalling (with the side effect that the gem local source cache finally works) and also did some work on Multibyte::Chars. This work is going fast forward. My part in this is ActionPack, where we right now are down to 9 failures and 0 errors, from 23 failures and 8 errors. Those numbers are for 1150 tests and 5202 assertions, so there isn't much left to get this working.

My work on the YARV compiler continues, and I will soon post an update about this too.