YARV 0.2.1 Released

For those of you out there eagerly anticipating Rite, the upcoming ruby VM, you should be happy to hear that Ko1 has released a new version of YARV.

For those unfamiliar, YARV stands for Yet Another Ruby VM, but is anything but that. Sasada Koichi has received Matz’s blessing to merge YARV with the Ruby 1.9 branch– so it will eventually become the Ruby 2.0 VM (Rite). This is a huge deal in the ruby community because Ruby has always (often deservedly) been disparaged for its speed in execution.

Sasada’s made great progress in his VM and shown tremendous speed improvements. We should hopefully see an officially merged version before the end of the year (or more optimistically, the end of summer). Future plans for YARV include native threading, and multiple VM instances per process (to help efforts like mod_ruby).

I strongly suggest everybody check out Sasada’s work if you can and help test it out. He’s doing a great service for all of us Ruby programmers. Even if you can’t help bug-test or experiment with YARV, at least drop him a note cheering him on – he’s doing a great job.