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Comment by nielsbot | Hacker News Reader

You might be interested in TruffleRuby: https://github.com/oracle/truffleruby "A high performance implementation of the Ruby programming language. Built on the GraalVM by Oracle Labs."

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I researched this yesterday against Crystal. Seems people won’t touch it because of oracle. Which is a real shame. Truffle is a 9x improvement in speed over Ruby. But because Oracle is a patent nightmare and a dying organization. People aren’t interested.

Uh, how is oracle a dying organization?

I went to go look for evidence of oracle dying and actually came up empty handed. I was also under this impression. I think it has waned significantly in popularity in the developer community over the years, but their stock isn’t bad at all and they seem to have diversified quite a bit in the time they’ve existed.

Oracle doesn't even seem that patent happy these days. They seem to have got burned by their experience with the Java patents (all useless, case revolves now around copyright).

Financially Oracle is doing very well indeed.

There's also JRuby, Ruby running on the JVM. Which can be insanely fast for anything longer running than your typical CLI use case.

I believe Truffle was 3-4x+ faster than Jruby. This is what Ruby needs. But Oracle will ruin it.

headius is at a jvm conf right now talking about optimizing JRuby, and here's a recent video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vxIncIm2D4

Well, JRuby runs on the JVM which is developed by Oracle. Basically, if you're a ruby user who wants good performance there's not many other places to turn.

But you know Oracle acquired Java long ago and other than Google, I'm unaware of Oracle causing problems for any other users. And Google is a rather special case - they reimplemented an incompatible version of Java without licensing it. You're not going to be doing that.

It's open source, the community can always fork it and move forwards if they dislike what Oracle does with it.

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