I’m really stoked about this. I think rubinius has so much potential that I am really happy to be able to support it. Starting next month Evan Phoenix is going to be working here at EY half time on ey [EngineYard] tools and such and half time on rubinius.

For those of your who aren’t familiar with rubinius you can read a bit more about it here. It’s a new implementation of ruby done in a smalltalk style with a small core VM written in C and almost everyting else written in ruby. Really, even String and Array and definied in ruby. Rubinius is going to open up core ruby hacking to the masses as the internals won’t be a bunch of gnarly C code thats really hard to grasp.

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The situation for alternative Ruby implementations has changed significantly in the past year. First JRuby's core team was hired by Sun, then MS hired John Lam to work on IronRuby (a Ruby for .NET).Now, EngineYard has hired Evan Phoenix who works on the Rubinius project. InfoQ recently featured an interview with Ezra Zygmuntowicz of EngineYard . EngineYard offers Rails hosting and makes use of virtualization to allow flexible solutions and easy scaling. Ezra Zygmuntowicz on hiring Evan Phoenix He follows with a quick explanation of Rubinius:It's important to point one thing out: with Evan Phoenix being paid to work on Rubinius,Ruby implementations (Ruby, JRuby, IronRuby, Rubinius) now have paid developers working on them.