Rubinius or GitHub repo, an alternative Ruby implementation that's built in Ruby itself - as much as possible, has this last weekend hit the coding equivalent of a Bar Mitzvah..

In order to execute Ruby code as fast as possible, Rubinius has the ability to compile Ruby code all the way down to machine code when it detects that a method is heavily used. In Rubinius, the system that manages this process is its JIT.

In today’s post, I’ll be giving an overview of the various players involved in the path that code takes to get from source to machine code. Without further ado, I’ll jump right in.

JRuby is undoubtedly the most mature of the alternative Ruby implementations. Supporting Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.1 (mostly!) and JIT compilation, JRuby is already in use in mission critical Ruby apps and runs scarily fast on the JVM. In this interview with JRuby core member, Charles Nutter, we dig deep into what makes JRuby tick.

This article was originally included in the February issue of the Engine Yard Newsletter. To read more posts like this one, subscribe to the Engine Yard Newsletter.

In this series, Evan Phoenix, Rubinius creator and Ruby expert, presents tips and tricks to help you improve your knowledge of Ruby.

This took a few days, but it's very simple to do and should take minutes. If you're using Engine Yard Cloud, it's not obvious, but it is trivial. The post assumes you have Thinking Sphinx and the Sphinx daemon running on your dev machine and aren't new to either. I used the Thinking Sphinx plugin, as Engine Yard recommends, but I see there is also a gem which my work.I'm working from memory