The Ruby VM Serial Interview

I have really enjoyed reading Pat Eyler's Rubinius Serial Interview and Nick Sieger's spun-off JRuby Serial Interview. It's very educational to read what the developers have to say about their projects and ideas.

The more I read though, the more I wanted the equivalent content for the official Ruby VM. I asked Matz and Koichi if they would be willing to answer questions from me and they agreed to do so. We are now ready to share their responses with the community.

This will be a serial interview as Pat Eyler calls them. We will deliver regular episodes until I run out of good questions or Matz and Koichi get sick of me bothering them, whichever comes first. I will ask the questions in the interview, but feel free to make suggestions in the comments to this article.

One last note: we are not promising any kind of schedule for the episodes. Matz and Koichi are heroically providing their answers in English. We want to respect how much work that is and give them all the time they need to do that. Personally, I cannot thank them enough.

With that, I give you the episode index:

1. In this first episode I ask Matz and Koichi to introduce themselves and their roles as well as to give us an update on where we are with the Ruby VM.
2. In the second episode I ask Matz and Koichi about for their thoughts on the alternate Ruby implementations and how they see them changing Ruby's development.
3. In the third episode Matz and Koichi discuss the past, present and future of Ruby threading.
4. In the fourth episode Matz tells us a little about how m17n is shaping up.
5. In the fifth episode Koichi gives us the inside story on optimization in the new VM.