Honestly, do you think they will open source it? I doubt it!

I only want to nitpick on one thing here because it is my personal pet peeve:

“For a start, MRI is neither a compiler or a VM—it’s an interpreter.”

The thing is that right now no VM can “deliver” really the way MRI does. Let’s put speed issues aside for now (and I think the situation with python is not sooooooo much different anyway)

As far as I understood it, every VM has a few problems, so it is no big deal to have problems here or there. It’s still work in progress….
Some have less problems than others, some can run rails, some can’t etc… doesn’t matter that much. Future will show of improves.

BUT any bugs that are left after - let’s say 2 years - would basically mean that they target _another_ language basically, not ruby (if it behaves differently from MRI).
And I say ruby, because there is more than rails in (or within) ruby. Rails is just a comparatively complex application compared to others.

So this is my foremost scepticism because, frankly, I don’t care about a nice VM that runs a few apps and forgets the rest. I am not accusing anyone of this at all, it just seems this way with all the VMS right now. If the goal is to let rails users run their rails apps on VMs, then I think this should be made clear, so that it does not generate even more hype than rails generated, and we “normal” ruby folks can continue to concentrate on other things and let the railsers play with that.

Being completely “ruby compliant” should be the number one priority.

See that quote you want to save for posterity? Notice the words in the middle? “Until conclusively proven otherwise”. I’m a Ruby developer and I would love to be proven wrong. If this product fulfils these claims then I would buy it in a millisecond. No need to save my quote somewhere, I’ll put it up in flashing letters as I rave about how happy I am to be proven completely wrong.

However, I have plenty of doubts about Maglev. I’ve been paying pretty close attention through the development of JRuby and something their experience has really rammed home for me is the complexity and nuance of Ruby as a language. It may well be similar to Smalltalk in some respects but I don’t think it’s as simple a matter to transmute a VM designed for one to the other. And I am well aware that MRI is not a particularly advanced interpreter but you can’t possibly argue that the JRuby one isn’t.

BTW, you’re right that I mixed up VM and interpreter a couple of times, I’ll fix that. But your “correction” on the definition of shared-nothing is ridiculous - my usage is the commonly accepted one, you’re just nitpicking at that point.

Anyway, no offence intended and sorry if it was caused. I just don’t like way-ahead-of-release vapourware, and the hype that followed it is inarguably unjustified based on the very incomplete demonstration given. I’ll stand by that opinion, and wish the best of luck to your friends to live up to the expectations they’ve created.