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What's bad about JRuby?

question 2 connections

Audience question reframed as: if JRuby does all this, why doesn't everyone use it? Charles answers with two or three recurring friction points: (1) startup time — historically painful (multi-second rake tasks), now ~400ms baseline and 1–1.5s for big loads; (2) missing C extensions — big ones (Nokogiri, JSON, Psych) have JRuby versions that auto-install with the gem, but many small C extensions still need a JRuby port or an API swap to an equivalent JVM library; (3) beyond those, once the app bundles it usually 'just works'.

answer_summary
Mainly JVM startup time (largely resolved — ~400ms baseline, 1–1.5s for big rake tasks) and missing C extensions (big ones like Nokogiri/JSON/Psych ship JRuby versions; smaller ones need ports or JVM-library swaps). Beyond that, apps usually just work.
question What's bad about JRuby?
about
JRuby tool
Asks about JRuby's downsides.
question What's bad about JRuby?
asked_at
First Q&A question after the talk.

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