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Earlier this month, Engine Yard’s Brian Shirai announced the development of a new programming language called Rubinius X. Its goal is to modernize Ruby. The announcement proclaimed, “Ruby is a dying language. Business is over its dalliance with Ruby. No major startup is lauding their use of Ruby, and existing businesses are migrating away or simply writing new applications in a different language.”
However, Shirai says that he actually loves Ruby and thinks it is “a fantastic language.” He wants to update the language for the Internet era and add more support for concurrency and parallelism. “More than any specific feature in Rubinius X, it is that the entire system is being reworked from the bottom up to support the highest degree of concurrency and parallelism possible,” Shirai explains. “Certain APIs are being changed, further concurrency abstractions are being added, and all of this is built-in, instead of being an afterthought relegated to the ‘standard library’ or other libraries.”
