Talking JavaOne with Rock Star Charles Nutter
- by Janice J. Heiss
JavaOne Rock Stars,
conceived in 2005, are the top rated speakers from the JavaOne
Conference. They are awarded by their peers who through conference
surveys recognize them for their outstanding sessions and speaking
ability. Over the years many of the world’s leading Java developers have
been so recognized.We spoke with distinguished Rock Star, Charles Nutter. A JRuby Update from Charles NutterCharles
Nutter of Red Hat is well known as a lead developer of JRuby, a Ruby
implementation of Java that is tightly integrated with Java to allow for
the embedding of the interpreter into any Java application with full
two-way access between the Java and the Ruby code. Nutter is giving the following sessions at this year’s JavaOne:
CON7257 – “JVM Bytecode for Dummies (and the Rest of Us Too)”
CON7284 – “Implementing Ruby: The Long, Hard Road”
CON7263 – “JVM JIT for Dummies”
BOF6682 – “I’ve Got 99 Languages, but Java Ain’t One”
CON6575 – “Polyglot for Dummies” (Both with Thomas Enebo)
I asked Nutter, to give us the latest on JRuby. “JRuby seems
to have hit a tipping point this past year,” he explained, “moving from
‘just another Ruby implementation’ to ‘the best Ruby implementation for
X,’ where X may be performance, scaling, big data, stability,
reliability, security, and a number of other features important for
today's applications. We're currently wrapping up JRuby 1.7, which
improves support for Ruby 1.9 APIs, solves a number of user issues and
concurrency challenges, and utilizes invokedynamic to outperform all
other Ruby implementations by a wide margin. JRuby just gets better and
better.” When asked what he thought about the rapid growth of
alternative languages for the JVM, he replied, “I'm very intrigued by
efforts to bring a high-performance JavaScript runtime to the JVM.
There's really no reason the JVM couldn't be the fastest platform for
running JavaScript with the right implementation, and I'm excited to see
that happen.”And what is Nutter working on currently? “Aside
from JRuby 1.7 wrap-up,” he explained, “I'm helping the Hotspot
developers investigate invokedynamic performance issues and test-driving
their new invokedynamic code in Java 8. I'm also starting to explore
ways to improve the general state of dynamic languages on the JVM using
JRuby as a guide, and to help the JVM become a better platform for all
kinds of languages.”
Originally published on blogs.oracle.com/javaone.
