> For a lot of folks, rubinius has already replaced MRI. At least locally while developing.
This in itself certainly is a great achievement for the rubinius team and one to be proud of. However, I personally have to see a large production deployment. I consider rbx a serious alternative to mri, just as jruby is a serious alternative. I'll call it "replacement" once heroku starts using rbx and drops mri support. I don't see that happening in the next couple of years, there's just way too much investment behind mri for it to just go away.
I don't think we'll see a fork. There will be some gems that support rbx only and some that are MRI only and some that require jruby. However, seeing how things go with jruby I'd expect that most of the code stays runtime agnostic and people will use whatever runtime suits the current problem best. Given that there's a ruby spec now I imagine we'll end up pretty much where javascript is: Multiple runtimes that all support pretty much the same code. Or have a look at java or c, there's more than one jvm and with good reason as well as multiple c compilers that all produce working code :)
And yes, I do see heroku supporting both MRI and rbx as equals, but my point was that that's not replacing.
This in itself certainly is a great achievement for the rubinius team and one to be proud of. However, I personally have to see a large production deployment. I consider rbx a serious alternative to mri, just as jruby is a serious alternative. I'll call it "replacement" once heroku starts using rbx and drops mri support. I don't see that happening in the next couple of years, there's just way too much investment behind mri for it to just go away.