The Next Big Browser Language

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away… actually a couple years ago, in Japan, a man was toiling away on creating a Ruby VM completely written in JavaScript. The year was 2007, Ruby 1.9.0 was still new and the global economy was in full swing. Everything was looking great for Ruby VM’s, Flash, the browser? It’s all good. Benchmarks proclaimed amazing speed increases and the RSS feeds were abuzz with the news.

But then the months went by and not much happened. Then sometime in June 2008 the source got imported into github. Then another month went by and again, not much happened, although the HotRuby website did get a redesign. Then almost a year went by, nothing much happened. Not much news on any front…

And that about catches us up to last week. I was doing some deep digging into JavaScript. I was thinking about ways to implement more Rubyesque patterns like Modules and the like when I remembered reading about the HotRuby VM a while back. I wanted to know if I could sidestep this whole JavaScript issue by running Ruby as a scripting language in the browser.

JavaScript is the de facto language of the internet. It has a distinct terribleness to it, but also a grotesque beauty. It is a powerful, misunderstood language that grew up to fast, being robbed of it’s childhood during the great browser wars. And now, after a resurgence or two, it is really coming into its own. ECMAScript 5th Edition looks to be a beacon of hope, but will it really be as joyful as being able to program Ruby as a browser scripting language? JavaScript frameworks have shown strong improvement and make working with the DOM nearly pleasant. All this means that we can’t just sit around and wait for JavaScript to die. If we do we’d just get stuck with another compromised language anyway.

But something happened over the past year during which HotRuby was laying fallow. Many things happened. Google released a browser adding another horse to the current browser race. JavaScript implementations are racing to improve performance. In addition, this now makes two major players in the browser market open source browsers: patches can be submitted that provide support for scripting languages beyond JavaScript.

Ruby 1.9.1 was released and is slowly gaining steam. It’s matured significantly and now the opcodes will be less susceptible to change, good news for VM implementers. Ruby has also permeated all the major platforms with JRuby and IronRuby (and even BlueRuby!!). Developers may wish to use Ruby as a clientside scripting language as well, I sure as hell know that I do.

And that’s why I did it. That’s why I did what had to be done. I forked the github repository of HotRuby (github sure makes picking up where others left off easy!), I hammered and hammered until it “worked” with Ruby 1.9.1 (and broke it only a little). And I added jQuery. I thought that in order to get Ruby into the browser that I might have to implement an entire interface to the DOM, but that was misguided. Implementing an entire DOM manipulation package in Ruby would be a waste when jQuery brings an admirable elegance to JavaScript, such that you can almost forget JavaScript’s ugly dark secrets. Now that Ruby can run in the browser and easily access $native objects, jQuery fits in exactly where Ruby needed it.

So check it, the long term vision: JavaScript RubyVM (HotRuby) provides a way to script in Ruby on legacy browsers (IE). Ruby implemented natively as a clientside scripting language in all modern browsers (Chrome, Firefox). jQuery continues to rock the DOM. Everyone wins!

And the good news is that it’s not too far in the future…

Author: Daniel X

Heretic priest of the Machine God. I enjoy crawling around in Jeff Bezo's spaceship, bringing technology to the people, and long walks outside of time and space. View all posts by Daniel X