The Ruby devroom at FOSDEM is a focused developer room around the Ruby programming language and the open source projects which implement it. While the Ruby community does have a number of regional conferences devoted to its use, opportunities for those interested in the “how it works” of Ruby interpreters and virtual machines are practically non-existent. The goal of this developer room is to discuss:

The current state of the Ruby language

Techniques employed by various VMs and their effectiveness

Upcoming Ruby language features, and the challenges/benefits that they provide

Tools and practices used to certify Ruby language conformity and performance

Costs and Opportunities provided by the multitude of implementations

Involved projects

Why we’re here

While many Ruby developers attend FOSDEM, the Ruby open source community has generally been underrepresented in the technical content of the event. With the Ruby devroom not only would the Ruby community become more plugged into the FOSDEM experience, but FOSDEM would be hosting Ruby-oriented content that is both unique and very technical. Considering the broad interest in dynamic and interpreted languages, the Ruby devroom will also provide compelling technical content interesting to members of the Python, Perl, JavaScript, Smalltalk, LLVM and Java communities. There is quite some interest in the topic, as the overcrowded Java dev room if Charles Oliver Nutter’s talk on JRuby in the FOSDEM 2014 Free Java devroom is any indication.

Considering the number of notable Ruby implementations, listed below, there should be more than enough highly interesting and technical content!

Ruby (MRI, the original C-based VM)

JRuby (Ruby on the JVM)

Rubinius (Ruby on Ruby)

Topaz (Ruby on RPython, the toolkit that PyPy built)

RubyTruffle (JRuby using Oracle’s Truffle compiler)

RubyMotion (Ruby on top of Apple’s Objective-C/Cocoa foundation)

Maglev (Ruby on the GemStone Smalltalk VM)

Opal (A working Ruby to JavaScript transpiler)

mruby (lightweight, embedded Ruby)

When and Where

The Ruby devroom takes place on Saturday, the 4th February 2017, in the room K.4.201, building K, on the Solbosch Campus, Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Who we are

Christophe Philemotte - Ruby Belgium board member

Silvana Precup - Ruby Belgium board member

Tiago Mendes-Costa - Ruby Belgium User Group (aka BRUG) organizer

Helio Cola - Ruby & Coffee for all

Code of Conduct

We dedicate ourselves to making everyone feel welcome and at home. Our Code of Conduct offers some guidelines to ensure this for both attendees and speakers. The organizers are available to anyone who is anything less than completely comfortable.

How could you support the devroom?

If you’d like to help the Ruby devroom to welcome speakers from all around the world, you do it via sponsorship.

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