Xblog

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).