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OT:

I knew it!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=727427

JRuby guys quit on Oracle and went with EngineYard. Yeah, because they knew they only sponsored the JSR for dynamic languages. I too would quit my day job if Sun was customizing the JVM to support my compiler better.

[Edit: s/ibm/oracle/]

They were employed by Sun, not IBM, and already worked on JRuby full time. I think this was more about integration into the Ruby community as well as getting a good JRuby deployment option in place at EY, as well as uncertainty over Oracle's acquisition of Sun.

Edit -- Charlie Nutter on jruby-user: "The primary reason for leaving was the high level of uncertainty involved."

Good catch, but still. If they knew Sun had a JSR waiting to leave the door that would essentially put their pet project on the map, it makes perfect sense to go with a more cutting-edge vendor who would care for it, maybe negotiating better pay, or even waiting another year before launching your own support-shop.
I don't understand what you're getting at. Why did you emphasize "only" above? Are you trying to imply the JRuby guys are leveraging some kind of inside knowledge? You know this JSR's been in the works since early 2006, right?
The JSR will certainly improve JRuby's speed and simplify development, but I don't think it will affect adoption (and actually I'd say JRuby was already on the map, given that it can run Rails and handily beats Ruby 1.8 performance-wise).

JRuby's real problem is that the Ruby community is wary of anything with a J in the name that's sponsored by Sun. Hopefully this will help out with that.

This should be the Java equivalent of the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) built on top of the CLR.
How about continuations and TCO while we're at it?
What is JDK 7? Yet another marketing buzzword? Would it happen to run on emerged ARM-based platforms? Netbooks? iPhone? Android? Symbian? Whatever?
Java Development Kit, let's you compile Java code to bytecode (As opposed to the JRE, Java Runtime Environment, which runs it).

It's cross platform and not a marketing buzzword at all.

Have you done this before?

Since this uses a new bytecode on the JVM I wonder how backwards compatibility is going to be handled?

I hope we don't see a painful period where people stuck with old JDKs (Mac users, that means you) are going to be unable to use the newest versions of dynamic languages. Even just having to distribute separate binaries for pre-JDK7 runtimes will be an annoyance that people in the java community have not experienced for a long time.