> > do my own benchmarks of course using the newest Java with the fancy
> > Hotspot VM.
> >
> Have they finally achieved some good performance with Hotspot? Its
> interesting since Hotspot is based on AniMorphic VM which has been
> discussed in RubyVM and related threads.

Well as I expressed I'm interested in Ruby performance issues so I've
been doing some research.  So far I've really only read through the
HotSpot Whitepaper and played with some of the Swing examples that come
with the JDK.  The Swing examples feel pretty fast on my P3 800 laptop
running Win2K.  Of course that isn't exactly a good way to benchmark,
but based on previous complaints of the slowness of Swing it isn't bad.

Also the concepts they describe in the whitepaper certainly make sense,
and they obviously implemented them successfully.  I'm still wondering
if I should check out the source code, which is available with the "Sun
Community License" or if that is just too dangerous since I might be
"contaminated" if I read it and might get sued if I were to implement
something similar for Ruby.  Of course maybe Sun would like the idea of
a different language implemented using concepts from Java, but probably
not.  Of course I think most of the concepts are pretty well known and
have a lot of research behind them in universities.

But from you said in the other email Robert, it looks like I need to
check out what some of the Japanese guys are doing.  It sounds pretty
cool.  The language issue could be a problem though...

Ryan Leavengood