I think it’d be great if Sun put a lot of resources into creating a world-class Ruby VM. They have some good experience in that space with Java. Of course, maybe they’re killing two birds with one stone with JRuby.

Charles Nutter came up on stage and announced a few things about JRuby:

The 1.0 release candidate 2 is out now.

JRuby 1.0 is coming out at the end of the month.

You can get a t-shirt in exchange for submitting a patch.

Oh, also Tim took a poll and it seems like 1/2 the audience works for a startup, 1/2 for an existing company, and 1/3 for a consulting company. Yea it all adds up to 1 1/3rd, but the question was a little fuzzy. For some reason I thought it’d be consultants mostly, then existing companies, and then startups. But I guess we’re in a new kind of world here, one that Paul Graham loves and has predicted.

Sitting in the “Your First Day with JRuby on Rails” now. As a former Javaholic and current Rails aficionado, I figured it’d be good to get the lowdown on this possible fusion of the two. Plus we all need a better Ruby VM.