$200 -> Rubinius

I’ve been using Ruby sporadically for some time, including in a bit of production code (in which it is running well), but the apparent lack of progress toward a more modern VM for Ruby makes it harder to get more deeply involved. On the one hand, today’s Ruby interpreter/runtime is sufficiently good to build very successful services on (37Signal’s Rails-based services, for exampel); but in my own testing for the kinds of higher volume data handling I often need to do, it’s among the slowest I’d used. That matters little for populating a web page, but matters a lot for things like OLAP ETL.

So today I joined Geoffrey Grosenbach in supporting Evan Phoenix’s rubinius project, by sending $200 to help sponsor the work. It’s not much in the grand scheme of things, but I believe in “putting your money where your mouth is”.

This isn’t the first time I mentioned Geoff; earlier this year I took him to task for his choice of music for the Ruby on Rails podcast, which has changed since then to something more suitable.