Joni merged to JRuby trunk


This is a glorious day! Joni (Marcin’s incredible Java port of the Oniguruma regexp engine) has been merged to JRuby trunk. It seems to work really well right now.

I did some initial testing, and the Petstore numbers are more or less the same as before, actually. This is explained by the fact that I did the integration quite quick and tried to get stuff working without concern for performance. We will go through the implementations and tune them for Joni soon, and this will absolutely give JRuby a valuable boost.

Marcin is also continuing to improve Joni performance, so over all this is a very nice approach.

Happy merge day!



JRuby regular expression update


It’s been some time since I wrote about what’s happening in JRuby trunk right now, and what we’re working on. The reason is I’ve been really boring. All my time I’ve spent on Regular Expressions and the REJ implementation. Well, that’s ended now. After Marcin got the Oniguruma port close enough, we are both focusing on that instead. REJ’s implementation had some fundamental problems that would make it really hard to get better performance. In this regard, Joni is a better implementation. Also, Marcin is incredible at optimization so if everything goes as planned, we’re looking at better general Regular Expression performance, better compatibility and a much more competent implementation.

And boy am I bored by this now. =) I’d really like to get back to fixing bugs and get JRuby ready for the next release. That might happen soon, though – I’ve spent the weekend getting Joni integrated with JRuby inside a branch and today reached the goal of getting everything to compile. Also, easier programs run, like jirb. Our test suite fails, though, so there are still things to do. But getting everything compiling and ditching JRegex is a major point on the way of replacing JRegex in JRuby core. It shouldn’t be too far off, and I think it will be fair to say we will have Joni in JRuby 1.1. Actually, 1.1 is really going to be an awesome release.