Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Help Us Complete JRuby 1.1 and 1.0.2 Releases

We're looking to do releases of a 1.1 beta and 1.0.2 over the next couple weeks, and we're hoping to pull in help from the community to turn over as many bugs as possible. A lot of the bugs we'd like to fix for each release wouldn't be very difficult for folks to get into, even if you only have a bit of Ruby experience and a good Java background. Currently we're looking at the following counts:

  • JRuby 1.0.2: 54 scheduled - These are almost exclusively compatibility issues, though there's a few minor performance items and several stability fixes.
  • JRuby 1.1: 147 scheduled - There's almost all the 1.0.2 bugs in here plus many additional performance enhancements and bug fixes that can't be cleanly/easily backported to 1.0.2.
  • Post 1.1: 7 JRuby 1.x, 71 unscheduled - These bugs are in danger of getting punted to a future release, so if you have a bug in these lists or you see something you think you'd like to/want to fix, now's the time.
The 1.0.2 release is basically a maintenance release to the 1.0 branch, and as such includes primarily compatibility and stability fixes. There's a couple minor perf issues that will be resolved, generally only where they were considered so slow as to be "broken".

The big story is going to be 1.1. It will include a massive number of performance enhancements and bug fixes. It will include a complete Ruby-to-Java bytecode compiler, which is responsible for much of the performance improvements. And it should also include a completely reworked regular expression subsystem that eliminates one of the last really major bottlenecks running Rails code. We may not have that done for the 1.1 beta release at RubyConf, but it will be there for 1.1 final around a month later.

So if you've been looking for a chance to get involved in JRuby, hop on the mailing lists or start browing the bug lists above, and feel free to email me directly (firstname.lastname@sun.com) if you have questions about any specific bug. JRuby needs your support!