Rubinius Version 1.0 will be released in summer 2008, according to Tom Mornini, chief technology officer and co-founder of Engine Yard, the lead sponsor of the forthcoming Ruby virtual machine. That's great news to the growing number of Ruby fans in the developer community.

Mornini discussed the open-source project during a forum in New York hosted by VC firm Insight Venture Partners. (Insight is the parent company of eWEEK.)

As Darryl Taft reported earlier this year, Ruby is gaining a lot of traction in the developer community, particularly for purposes of Web development. Fans of Ruby claim that it's easier to use than other Web programming languages and helps speed project completion and deployments.

Mornini argued that Rubinius has significant advantages over other Ruby implementations, such as IronRuby (a .Net-based effort led by Microsoft), JRuby (a Java-based Ruby interpreter led by Sun) and MRI Ruby (the official Ruby interpreter, written in C).

For one thing, Mornini said, Rubinius is written in Ruby, rather than C. That makes it easier for developers who are less conversant in C (as Mornini admitted is the case for him) and those more used to working with the fast-moving Ruby.

Rubinius will provide significant improvements to the Ruby developer community, such as multi-VM and support for actor-based programming and multicore concurrency. "It's difficult to do threading right in Ruby, for different reasons," Mornini said.

The project has significant traction in the open-source community, with 136 committers--compared with 53 for MRI Ruby, 22 for JRuby and 10 for IronRuby.

Mornini said Rubinius is following Agile and behavior-driven development.

Mornini did allow that Rubinius is currently significantly--35 times--slower than MRI. He put up a funny slide with a chart showing that Rubinius is faster than a turtle and a three-legged dog, but slower than the space shuttle.

But, he said, "We're not focused on performance, we're focused on making it Ruby. Performance is after the fact."

He added, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."

Mornini was fairly critical of MRI. "The existing Ruby implementation is not a super organization or particularly well-structured environment. You can't depend on the implementation," he said.

The most recent release, Version 1.8.6, broke several APIs that had worked in the past, he said.

I talked to Mornini over lunch, and he seemed befuddled by the recent release. "It's the kind of thing you see with proprietary software and that you never see in open-source software because of the transparency of the process. I don't understand it," he said.

Glen de Vries, president of Medidata Solutions Worldwide, a company that helps test drugs and devices for pharmaceutical companies, also spoke at the forum, and he debunked some claims that Mornini and the Ruby community make about Ruby implementation speeds.

He said, "Rails is awesome for Agile development, but the last 5 percent of our rails projects seems to be harder than usual."

In the final analysis, "We haven't done any of these projects faster than we thought we would."

His advice to developers: "Don't use Rails on Windows. Ever."

Mornini agreed that Ruby is entirely designed for building in green field environments. "Connecting to a legacy environment is a weakness," he said.

It will be interesting to see how the community receives Version 1.0 this summer. Given the enthusiasm of Ruby adepts, the reaction is likely to be fairly enthusiastic.