tisdag, april 22, 2008

Ruby Design meeting

Yesterday marked the first of the Ruby design meetings, where most of the Ruby implementers got together on IRC and started hashing out the solutions to several current concerns, and worked on getting more cooperation in the design of Ruby features.

This is slated to become a weekly meeting, and it's a huge deal. This will make the lives of all Ruby implementations much easier, and the meeting yesterday actually accomplished some very nice things.

There were representatives from JRuby, Rubinius and macruby present, and of course also Matz, Koichi, Nobu and Tanaka from the Ruby core team.

Some of the highlights was a decision to start working on a common API for MultiVM, initial acceptance to add the RubySpecs (coming from Rubinius originally) into the 1.8 and 1.9 build process, meaning that regression testing will be much better from now on, and also having most implementations using the same specs for compliance testing. In reality, this takes us one step closer to a real executable specification that everyone agrees on and has official blessing from Matz.

In conjunction with this, a decision to set up continuous integration for 1.8 and 1.9 was made. The exact practicalities is still to be decided, but the decision to get it done is also very important.

All in all, these are excellent news, and I'm feeling extremely hopeful about more cooperation between the Ruby implementors.

If you're interested in exactly what happened, you can find the agenda, action items and log here: http://ruby-design.pbwiki.com/Design20080421.

3 kommentarer:

Paul sa...

I am still relatively new to the ruby community so please excuse me if this is a silly question, but how come there was no IronRuby representitive present?

Ola Bini sa...

@Paul, not a silly question at all. In fact, John Lam was invited and should have been there, but couldn't get the time to work for him this time. He'll be there in the future. It's really hard to schedule something that works for people from both Japan, US and EU, so I think we managed well. =)

Paul sa...

Ahh I see, makes sense. I can definitely appreciate the logistical issues, its difficult to imagine a combination of 3 geographical regions that could be WORSE in fact.