Help Us Set Priorities for JRuby 1.3

With JRuby 1.2 almost out the door, I want to talk a bit about where we should go with JRuby 1.3. There’s always more work to do, but in this case there’s a few different directions we could probably go.

Some obvious items will continue to see work:

• 1.9 libraries, interp, compiler, parser
• 1.8.6 bugs
• “Pure ruby” application support, like Rails deployment stuff (Warbler, AR-JDBC)

But there’s other areas that we may want to prioritize:

• 1.8.7 support
• Ruby execution performance (how fast do you want it?)
• Specific library performance (YAML, IO, Java)
• More Java integration improvement/refactoring (esp. subclassing)
• “Compiler #2” to produce normal Java classes from Ruby
• Improvements to AOT compilation (all-at-once, eliminate runtime codegen)
• Expand support for embedded/mobile platforms

And there’s a number of internal chores to work on too:

• Start generating most of the call path, to reduce duplicate code
• Specific-arity optimizations for block yield (could be big)
• Compiler cleanup and refactoring
• Modularization of core classes that aren’t valid on applet, Android, secured envs, etc; also may allow shipping smaller runtimes
• More startup perf work; I have a few ideas

As always, there’s way more tasks than the few of us committing to JRuby can work on, so I think we need to hear from users what’s important. Any of these? Other items?