RubyConf 2006—Day 3 (Sunday, 22 October 2006)
22 / Oct 2006This article was modified from its original published form. The most recent modification was on2014-09-25.
Series: RubyConf 2006
Justin Gehtland presented the sole Rails-related talk, as he was presenting Streamlined1. I’m quite impressed and would have loved to have known about this for my simple wedding guest list manager application that I wrote in Rails. The purpose of Streamlined is to fill in the stuff that’s necessary for the administrative work for a Rails application. It wholly rocks. By the new year, Streamlined will have a visual configuration mode for this.
While waiting for Sasada Koichi to set up, I suggested to Matz that perhaps something like RubyInline be included with the Ruby 1.9⁄2.0 release so that Transaction::Simple can dump singleton objects and the marshal format would be compatible between the various interpreters.
Sasada Koichi presented on the current state of YARV. He has recently gotten a job in Akihabara Sanctuary. The advances of YARV look impressive. He was running a Rails application on YARV with no problems. Nice.
John Lam reported on his Ruby/CLR bridge, which was started because he writes programs for his son’s birthday. Fascinating work, and amazing enough that Microsoft finally twisted his arms well enough for him to work on them to improve the CLR so that it better supports dynamic language. As someone—possibly James Gray—suggested at lunch: we’ve heard from three major platform vendors that they are taking Ruby very seriously. That rocks.
This afternoon we heard from Adam Keys with a one-act “play”, originally from the RejectConf evening. I’ve embedded2 it below for your viewing pleasure.
I gave a quick introduction to the Google Summer of Code process and what it did for Ruby. The introduction was an adaptation of the talk that I gave at LRUG in July. The numbers: 17 volunteers; 96 applications; 84 eligible; ~25 desired; 10 accepted; 7 or 8 completed (I know we had 8 at the beginning of July; I think one more dropped out in the interim). Greg Brown presented about his experience of doing Ruport for the Summer of Code. He was mentored by David Pollak. Jeff Hughes talked about porting Ruby to Symbian phones. He was mentored by Dibya Prikash. Jason Morrison spoke on Ruby Type Inference & Code Completion for RDT. The approach he used was naïve, but based on DDP by Lex Spoon (S. Alexander Spoon), which is Demand-Driven Analysis with Goal Pruning. Type flow analysis; it unions types over contours. He was mentored by Chris Williams.
That ended RubyConf 2006. I’m looking forward to next year, and I’m campaigning very hard to have it in Toronto3.
- The original link from here is dead. ↩
- My hosted version of the video no longer exists, but yay for YouTube. ↩
- I wasn’t able to get RubyConf to Toronto, but Pete Forde and Meghann Millard of Unspace ran RubyFringe (2008) and FutureRuby (2009). Aside from those two, I have not made it to any Ruby conference since RubyConf 2006, but I have booked a ticket for RubyConf 2014. ↩
- 2014-09-25: This article was originally two articles (morning and afternoon) that have been combined. They were originally written as travelogue stream-of-consciousness that were a little hard to read. I have tried to make this version a bit clearer, and have added some comments about how things have turned out in the years since.[ back ]