layout: post

title: The Once and Future Rubinius

author: Brian Shirai

Engine Yard has [posted their

statement](https://blog.engineyard.com/2013/the-future-of-rubinius) about

ending sponsorship for Rubinius, which gives me the opportunity to clearly

address the future of Rubinius.

First of all, Engine Yard deserves great respect and admiration for their

contribution to Rubinius and the entire Ruby community. I had the pleasure of

interacting often with three of the Engine Yard founders: Tom Mornini, Lance

Walley, and Ezra Zygmuntowicz. I have rarely had the good fortune to work with

people as ethical, careful, and visionary as these folks. They endeavored to

build community _and_ business together, and they were highly influential in

both.

Engine Yard's sponsorship of Rubinius certainly accelerated development and

brought the project to the attention of many developers. Additionally, Engine

Yard's sponsorship contributed to the success of

[RubySpec](http://rubyspec.org) as an idea and tool for unifying Ruby

compatibility across more than a half-dozen significant implementations of Ruby

for the benefit of the Ruby community.

So, thank you very much, Engine Yard!

The simplest statement about the status of Rubinius is that there are now zero

people paid to work on the project. This fact has several implications, none of

which are inherently negative.

On the one hand, Rubinius is free to aggressively pursue the goals of the

project in helping build the future of Ruby. On the other hand, I have

significantly less time to devote to the project. While unfortunate, I'm not

discouraged. I worked on Rubinius for over a year before Engine Yard hired me

and we accomplished a tremendous amount.

We still have numerous things yet to do. Over the past several weeks, I have

been working to simplify and focus the project so that all the time we can

invest pays significant rewards for developers and businesses. We'll continue

to streamline and accelerate delivering value to the people investing their

time to use Rubinius.

Rubinius has a broad and ambitious vision. Since Evan Phoenix created it,

Rubinius has been pushing the envelope. It was one of the first projects in the

Ruby community to use git. One of the first big projects on GitHub. One of the

first projects to use LLVM outside of the LLVM ecosystem. There have always

been skeptics voicing their opinions about Rubinius using Ruby, building

RubySpec, building our own virtual machine and garbage collector, removing the

global interpreter lock, using gems, about almost every aspect of the project.

Despite this, Rubinius keeps moving forward. People are experiencing the

tremendous value of running concurrent applications on modern hardware,

saturating the CPU cores instead of blowing out the memory. It's trivial to

migrate from MRI to Rubinius, continuing to use familiar platform tools and

running C-extensions. The terrific response to the 2.0 announcement has been

ample validation of our vision for Rubinius. We're just getting started.

Visit us in the #rubinius channel on Freenode and check out ways you can

[contribute](http://rubini.us/doc/en/contributing/) to the project. The

simplest, and always the most fun, way to contribute is to use Rubinius to do

something you find interesting.

The future is, by definition, undefined. Let's define it.