Ruby is pretty unique among scripting languages in having not only one but six (!) fairly mature runtime environments -- MRI, Rubinius, JRuby, MacRuby, IronRuby and MagLev -- each of them with specific strengths.
In this talk we will first give a brief overview of planet Ruby and its continents. Then we will embark together on a journey into the deepest concurrency jungles on Java island, where strange beasts like Kilim, Jetlang and Akka roam. With a little luck, we might even encounter the legendary Disruptor!
Using examples taken from actual production JRuby code, we will demonstrate how the power of the JVM plus the rich ecosystem around it are an ideal complement to the expressiveness of Ruby -- and how this killer combination can be used to fully exploit modern multicore hardware.
Remember when Avi Bryant spoke at RailsConf '07 about Ruby's future, and how it'd be slick if we could get to where Smalltalk was 30 years ago? Well, we kinda have, in some respects, with the 1.0 release of MagLev, a Ruby implementation running on a Smalltalk VM.
What makes MagLev really special? How about a baked-in object database that sits on top of a VM almost 30 years in the making? There are a lot of cool things you can do with this type of persistence, but it's quite different from what we do in a typical Ruby app.
Let's explore what this great implementation has to offer, and learn how to help it along.
Smalltalk is one of the forefathers of Object Oriented programming, and has a long history of being used in the field. One of the quiet players, many have heard of Smalltalk without having worked with it, but Smalltalk is indispensable in many industries including insurance, shipping, and finance. In this talk, you'll discover what Rubyists can learn from this grey bearded programming environment which inspired many of Ruby's best features.
Smalltalk has mystique. We talk about it more than we use it.
It seems like it should be so similar to Ruby. It has similar Object-Oriented structures, it even has blocks.
But everything is so slightly different, from the programming environment, to the 1-based arrays, to the simple syntax. Using Smalltalk will make you look at familiar constructs with new eyes.
We’ll show you how to get started on Smalltalk, and walk through some sample code. Live coding may be involved.
You’ll never look at objects the same way again.
A narrative about choosing the right tool for the right job.
