gwtmp01 / mac.com wrote:
> I find it somewhat disconcerting that Ruby might be hobbled by VMs 
> designed for other languages.  I've been playing around with 
> continuations to simplify web programming (like Iowa) and it is a really 
> nice solution.

Well, I'm not suggesting that Ruby itself should be held back by other 
VMs that can't support certain features, but any developers using those 
features will have to weigh their utility against the fact that they 
won't be able to run on some of the other implementations. If you don't 
care about the other implementations and the benefits they might bring, 
that ought to work out fine. If you do care about the other 
implementations, you'll choose not to use those features.

Already people have to make this choice anyway...symlinks or not, fork 
or not, check platform and alter behavior accordingly or not. The 
alternative implementations will just add a few more items to consider. 
It may also start to work the other way too...rely on native threading 
(JRuby) or not, rely on native unicode (JRuby) or not, rely on C or Java 
extensions or not. Choices always.

- Charlie