infoq

Ruby's creator and benevolent dictator Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto has done a video interview for InfoQ at the QCon enterprise software development conference.

InfoQ: "In this presentation from the JVM Languages Summit 2009, Cliff Click discusses the Von Neumann architecture, CISC vs RISC, the rise of multicore, Instruction-Level Parallelism (ILP), pipelining, out-of-order dispatch, static vs dynamic ILP, performance impact of cache misses, memory performance, memory vs CPU caching, examples of memory/CPU cache interaction, and tips for improving performance."

MagLev is a new(ish) Ruby implementation built by Gemstone Systems that focuses on providing an integrated object persistence layer and a distributed shared cache - a truly scalable Ruby implementation.

New to Ruby 1.9 is the concept of fibers.

Fibers are light-weight (green) threads with manual, cooperative scheduling, rather than the preemptive scheduling of Ruby 1.8's threads.

Since Ruby 1.9's threads exist at the system level, fibers are, in a way, Ruby 1.9's answer to Ruby 1.8's green threads, but lacking the pre-emptive scheduling.

Rhodes - developed by Rhomobile - is an intriguing framework of Ruby interpreters that can be used to develop native applications for the iPhone, Windows Mobile, RIM (Blackberry) and Symbian smartphone platforms (with Android support to come).

While it was pretty momentous last year when Mac OS X (Leopard) was released with full support for Ruby and Rails included with the OS, it seems that the Ruby train is still rolling with Apple.

(Credit: june29 - photo under CC 2.0 Attribution license)