I had the pleasure of being interviewed along side Aaron Junod on the Alt.NET Podcast to discuss IronRuby. 

Michael  Moore was a wonderful host and did an amazing job editing the conversation down to something tight.  It was an exciting opportunity to talk about IronRuby specifically and Ruby in general.  Hopefully it will help spark even more interest in it.

On a personal note, I’m interested in any feedback you might have, from the technical to the stylistic. It was my first time doing a podcast, so it’s definitely a learning experience for me.

I had the pleasure of attending devLink this past weekend in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.  Honestly, I almost blew this conference off.  The sessions really didn’t appeal to me, and it was a bit of a hike to get to.  But then Amanda Laucher announced the DevLink Bus. And I started to waver…  Then I heard that Alan Stevens would be organizing Open Spaces during the conference. I was sold.

Wednesday evening around 7:30, my wife dropped me off at Sadukie’s house. Brandon Joyce was already there, watching Family Guy.  After Sadukie finished gathering up her wares, we piled into her Durango and headed off to pick up Corey Haines. A quick trip across town and we were on our way to Toledo to catch the bus.

Well, more accurately we were on our way to Toledo to wait for the bus.  The bus apparently went to the wrong side of town and it had to turn around to pick us up.  This wasn’t entirely bad.  It gave us enough time to pick up beer and for Corey to have an impromptu parking lot concert. And what’s better then beer and music?

Eventually the bus arrived and we REALLY began our journey.  A journey of corny movies and lack of sleep.  After much tossing and turning and cursing of lack of leg room, we arrived in Tennessee about 9am.  At which point I collapsed in my hotel room and passed out. Waking up in the evening, I followed my instinct to the local hotel bar/restaurant. Later on, I ended up making my way to Alan’s room where a party was going down.  Guitars, Cigars, and Beers were being passed around with abandon until hotel security came to the door and asked us nicely to stop.

The rest of the time in Tennessee is really a blur.  I wish I could give a detailed synopsis of each day, replete with details and names.  But honestly, the days meld into one another, linked only by great conversations, new experiences, and wonderful people.  I can’t stress enough the amount of knowledge I gained, and the success of the Open Space format that was put into place.

Alas, it was over much too soon.  By Saturday night it was time to board the bus once again, and make the long, movie filled trip back to Ohio… Who knows, maybe this time I could get some sleep? I cuddled up to the window and slowly drifted…

“THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, THUMP!”  Okay, so sleep wasn’t going to happen.

A blown tire. Great, James Avery’s ribbing about “Everyone was screaming… except Cliff” went through my head.  It didn’t help that we passed a sign commemorating a 1988 bus tragedy (no joke). The bus slowly inched along, until we pulled into a gas station in English, Kentucky.  Our faces aglow in the soft light of nearby Waffle House.  We waited.  And Waited.  Cooter showed up, and proceeded to sheer three bolts off the wheel.  So we continued to wait.  But while we waited, a remarkable thing happened.  Incredible conversations took place.  On Comments, on SRP, and any number of things.  The Open Spaces continued into the most open space possible, the world beyond the conference. Then the acetylene torch came out.

So we waited a bit more.  Marriages came and went we waited so long. Eventually a new tire was on and we were off.  By 1pm I was home holding my daughter and reflecting on a fantastic conference.  I was thankful I ended up going, though some images will be seared into my brain, forever.

I’ll at least be able to say I shared a tour bus with a member of Ratt.

The best part is that the conversation continues at the Heartland Open Spaces Wiki. Be sure to stop by and join in!

Next, I’ll be at Agile Summer Camp, and then I’m home until CodeMash in January 2009.  To all my new friends, old friends, and friends to be, I hope to see you there!

One of the things I went over in my eRubyCon talk was the relative performance of IronRuby compared to both JRuby  (which I consider to be a cousin of sorts to IronRuby) and MRI. I did this by running the same tests that Antonio Cangiano ran in December.

There were a few test results that really stood out.  The lists test was by far the worst for IR, where it was 56 times as slow as MRI and 3 times as slow as JRuby.  But this wasn’t the only sore spot, there were other places that show room for improvement.  Namely, vm1_blocks in which IronRuby was almost 9 times as slow as MRI.  Also so_exception where IronRuby brought up the tail by being 10 times as slow as MRI.

The nitty gritty is that IronRuby is about twice as slow as MRI with JRuby being slightly faster, overall.  As the below graph illustrates:

There are a few high points in this test though.  Number one, is that IronRuby ran the majority of the tests.  There were only four failures out of forty, for a 90% success rate.  For comparison JRuby had 95% success rate. Number two, there were actually a few tests in which IronRuby beat JRuby and MRI.  No small feat for such a young implementation.

I think this mini-shootout illustrates that there is a lot of room for improvement for IronRuby.  However, a little perspective goes a long way.  JRuby was announced in 2001, IronRuby was announced last April.  The JRuby team has had 7 years to get to where they are today, whereas IronRuby has only had almost a year and a half! As the DLR improves IronRuby will receive those performance gains for free, and as compatibility becomes more stable the core team can focus on performance as well. The raw data can be downloaded here.

What a fantastic conference this was two weeks ago.  A great lineup of speakers, and fantastic after event gatherings.  And I missed the first day!  Josh Holmes has a great series of posts detailing the event, so I won’t repeat the play by play here.  But I can say that I will definitely be making the trip to Columbus for eRubyCon 2009. 

This was the first conference I have gone to where I actually presented.  My talk was originally geared more towards .NET developers interested in Ruby, thinking that there would be more Java and .NET enterprise folks there then it turned out.  After I arrived, as I listened to the attendees, I realized the audience was primarily people already doing Ruby.  I also noticed a certain level of distrust around Microsoft in general, even though the event was hosted in their office!  As I was going to be speaking on IronRuby, a Microsoft project, this concerned me a bit.  So I ended up putting in an opening section about some of, what I believe to be, the positive changes at Microsoft over the last half-decade or so.  I highlighted efforts like CodePlex and Port25.  A number of people seemed to copy down the Port25 address, so I hope I helped open some eyes in this case.  I also went over the current state of IronRuby, and compared it’s performance to JRuby.  I then asked who did .NET work in their day to day jobs and must have had about 5 people raise their hands.  Then I went through a short demo of opening up and changing a standard WinForms app using IronRuby. It seemed to go well, I’ve gotten positive feedback on it and a number of suggestions for improvement.

I can’t thank Joe O’Brien enough for the opportunity or confidence in me he showed by allowing me to speak.  The slides and demo used for my presentation are here.