2. In addition to being maintainer of Rubinius, Brian Shirai is the creator of RubySpec. To me, Rubinius X is more a forward-looking extension of RubySpec then it is something about building support for Rubinius-the-project. As RubySpec sought to create and concretize agreement on what Ruby is (which was important to making Ruby-the-language something more than MRI-the-implementation), Rubinius X is an (opinionated) effort to establish a consensus on where Ruby-the-language is going and how it is going to address the aspects of Ruby that are limiting its adoption.
3. I'm not at all surprised that the fact that Engine Yard, historically one of the biggest corporate players in the Ruby world and who until fairly recently was paying core developers for both JRuby and Rubinius is now not directly sponsoring either would be a source of soul searching and consideration of the future, both of the Rubinius and Ruby. I'd be rather more surprised if it wasn't.
1. Dying != dead
2. In addition to being maintainer of Rubinius, Brian Shirai is the creator of RubySpec. To me, Rubinius X is more a forward-looking extension of RubySpec then it is something about building support for Rubinius-the-project. As RubySpec sought to create and concretize agreement on what Ruby is (which was important to making Ruby-the-language something more than MRI-the-implementation), Rubinius X is an (opinionated) effort to establish a consensus on where Ruby-the-language is going and how it is going to address the aspects of Ruby that are limiting its adoption.
3. I'm not at all surprised that the fact that Engine Yard, historically one of the biggest corporate players in the Ruby world and who until fairly recently was paying core developers for both JRuby and Rubinius is now not directly sponsoring either would be a source of soul searching and consideration of the future, both of the Rubinius and Ruby. I'd be rather more surprised if it wasn't.