Sun is going to be giving full support to Ruby, and will be shipping a Ruby parser built on top of the Java Virtual Machine apparently with Java and Ruby both being fully supported by the VM.

I still am not sure if this isn’t some weirdo-World practical joke. I expect to wake tomorrow morning to find this is just another version of the Parrot Joke (which eventually became a real project).

If true, it means Ruby is about to get incredibly mainstream, and I’m going to spend the next five years having some real fun. It also means Joel is going to look even more stupid with regards to stating that Ruby is not ‘enterprise-ready’.

One of the biggest problems with Ruby right now is the current parser is slow and we’re having to jump through hoops just to get performance up. With web applications it’s not a major problem until you start to scale, and then most of your performance problems can be ironed out with some cacheing and database schema optomisation. Through more clock cycles at the database server, and most web apps get quicker - Ruby isn’t the slow part in that equation. However, this changes the game - _if_ the parser Sun ships is nice and fast.

The mailing lists however are strangely quiet. It may be that too many people want to adore Matz for longer, or that the performance will suck against the new official parser in development, or that nobody believes it. Or it really doesn’t matter.

But I say that when a language gets mainstream commercial support from one of the largest tech companies on the planet, that language has arrived and we should be grateful for it. I only hope the Java kids don’t steal our lunch money when we turn up and we all play nicely together.

The above link is to a thread that points eventually here and here that both help convince me this isn’t some warped joke.

I always thought there was something interesting about Sun. I think they might be about to become my favourite company again. I might even take another look at Solaris in coming weeks to see if they’ve made it suck less than the last time I played about five years ago. See - this is smart thinking on their part. They’ve got me interested in what they’re doing again. Tres cool, non?