Groovy Vs. JRuby - Fight !

Rod Cope talks about Groovy vs. JRuby. Personally I don't see why anyone would need to choose, it looks very much to me, as someone who has not used either to do anything significant, that you can mix and match, though not in the same block of code.

I have notes, that will hopefully get typed up, like my ADASS ones from last year ;O) but the quick version is, JRuby is slightly more mature, especially with it's autoboxing. Groovy is more Java-ish than JRuby, this should seem obvious when thinking of their heritage. Unusually JRuby seems to have a more involved form of static importing than Java, at least it seems unusual, but again it's a heritage thing. JRuby, or maybe I should say Ruby has operator overloading, though the JRuby implementation still has a little way to go. Groovy is currently faster than JRuby, by about 3* but the gap is closing, however Groovy is Java-centric where as JRuby is Ruby-centric and so has further to go.

2008-07-23 10:58:55

Pete says ...

"Groovy is nice but in some ways it's so closely tied to standard Java libraries that it feels a bit like Java's answer to .Net's VB rather than a language in it's own right. Which might not be a bad thing. It's certainly not a bad language. Ruby is older than Java, it has its own libraries and community, and it has an ever-increasing number of VMs. The skills are more transferable, I think. If Maglev delivers what it promises then that might be quite important."

2008-07-23 23:21:32

Optimist says ...

"I have edited this comment, if you have read it before, you may want to read it again. Groovy is dynamic scripting that plays well with Java, it's heavily influenced by Ruby, as in if you look at code snippets side by side they are almost identical, but it is also influenced by other scripting languages, it is however Java centric, though I do not think it's supposed to be Java's answer to anything, it's just a really *ahem* groovy language. JRuby offers a number of interesting things on top of the JVM, low-level file IO and multiple inheritance are two examples, though to be honest, the argument for multiple inheritance is a weak one. Transferring to Ruby from JRuby is easy, so easy in fact that JRuby code can almost always be run under Ruby, in fact what I haven't copied in from my notes was the quick 'require' test to see if you are running under JRuby or not. Transferring from Groovy to another language such as Ruby is probably not _as_ easy, but certainly does not seem difficult, as I said earlier it is very Ruby-like as it was a strong influence."

2008-07-24 09:27:01