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Mongrel and Mongrel2 are two very different projects that have very little beyond their name, author and the fact that they both are servers in common. They share no code and have very different designs and goals.

I believe they share some code (http parser)

which is written in Ragel and compiled to a C state machine, if I remember correctly

Well Ragel supports Ruby code output as well (it can generate any of C, C++, Objective-C, D, Java and Ruby). But I'd be surprised if Mongrel used that.

Some people do that. It actually was used in jruby, and I think a couple projects generated the raw ruby rather than the C version. Uhm, I want to say Rubinius?

i don't doubt that, why would ragel generate Ruby code if nobody used it? I just doubt mongrel used ruby ragel-generated code.

Mongrel 1.x is not related to Mongrel2.

Mongrel was written by Zed in Ruby. Mongrel2 is a new project.

Mongrel2 is a rewrite to be a scalable webserver that's language neutral. Think Apache (without all the pain).

/this note is me sharing what I've learned from zed's tweets, I've not played with the software yet, please correct if wrong.