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Re:"could it be Sun loves Ruby because it needs lots of thei... by andr on Friday April 18, 2008 @12:01PM (#167317)
No.

1) The marketing reason is pretty simple. If Sun does a lot for Ruby, they will win points with Ruby users, so when the time comes to choose an OS or buy servers, Sun would be higher on the list.

2) Every big corporation likes to have it's own technology. IBM is doing more for Java than Sun is, Microsoft has .NET, so Sun can back Ruby and it doesn't cost them much, since most of the work is already done.

3) The 15-20x number was off the cuff. I'm no expert, but it seems like the perceived Ruby slowness actually comes from Rails.

Re:"could it be Sun loves Ruby because it needs lots of thei... by freax on Friday April 18, 2008 @01:59PM (#167466)
Ruby was really slow prior to the latest version. It made Python look fast. It wasn't just Rails.
Re:"could it be Sun loves Ruby because it needs lots of thei... by zach on Friday April 18, 2008 @12:05PM (#167327)
Someone call Sun and tell them to stop sponsoring Rubinius work sessions, then. They wouldn't want Ruby to run too fast.
Re:"could it be Sun loves Ruby because it needs lots of thei... by henning on Friday April 18, 2008 @12:07PM (#167329)
They're also sponsoring JRuby, which at the moment is often even slower than MRI.
Re:"could it be Sun loves Ruby because it needs lots of thei... by donw on Friday April 18, 2008 @12:56PM (#167390)
I wasn't aware that Ruby could only run on a Sun machine. It's probably more likely that Sun is sponsoring Ruby for two reasons; one, because Ruby is a hot new technology at the moment, and thus has a lot of visibility; and two, because Sun needs a 'next-generation' platform now that Java is mainstream.