Ruby on... Gemstone? 2
Really, when you think about it, how can a company called Gemstone NOT get involved with a language called Ruby. So, Gemstone, of Gemstone and GLASS fame, have apparently decided to get the traditionally lackadaisical Ruby runtime running on their VM. From the first time I dabbled with Ruby it seemed like “file-based Smalltalk with some ugly Perl-isms and a crappy VM” (and yes, in fairness, the ugly Perl-isms are also part of its strength), so this makes a lot of sense, and may yet drag Ruby in to the real world. Gemstone gets bonus points for providing yet another example of confusing efficiency with scalability.
BTW: Mike came up with a great acronym for Gemstone to use: GLARE: “Gemstone Linux Apache and Ruby Emulation”.
UPDATE: Avi caught me red handed for not reading the entire interview. Upon further reading of the interview and Avi’s excellent blog posting comparing Gemstone to Rails, it appears the Gemstone folks are very much talking about scalability as opposed to efficiency. In fact, it seems they are expecting the primary advantage of MagLev to be through Gemstone’s persistence architecture (here’s hoping it is also a lot more efficient).
On what basis are you assuming that they are confusing efficiency with scalability? From the article: “We’re much more focused on scale than we are on raw performance. Although we believe our performance will compare very favorably with other implementations, we believe our scalable persistent architecture will be the most interesting differentiator.”
My bad Avi. Somehow I thought the project was just putting Ruby on the Gemstone VM, rather than making the whole Gemstone architecture available to Ruby, which obviously would provide some scalability benefits for a lot of Rails-type projects.