No JRuby Upgrade For Me
Just when I had the integration of Raven with JRuby 0.9.1 finished, the good folks of JRuby released a new version! As I always like to be on the cutting edge (in this case bleeding, read on…) I’ve tried the upgrade.
A couple of things are definite improvement. First it could be an impression but the execution seems slightly faster. It’s still pretty slow but not as much as the previous version I think (I’m running on Java 5). Second they seem to have incorporated most of my past issues so I could remove a couple of nasty worarounds from my code. So far so good.
But then there’s a couple of disappointments as well. Anytime you use Ruby Gems the following message appears (twice):
<pre><code>tempfile.rb:54 warning: JRuby does not currently support defining finalizers<code><pre>
Not so nice. And the worst thing for Raven is that environment variables usage aren’t working anymore so I can’t get a value for the user home. This seems to be a known issue but that blocks me nonetheless as I can’t think of a good workaround. So no JRuby 0.9.2 for Raven, I’ll wait for the next version.
Skunk Works 
About the “JRuby does not currently support defining finalizers” warning: It didn’t support them in 0.9.1 either, the only change is that it now warns about it when you try to use them.
I know but it’s just a drag that it nags you anytime you use Ruby Gems. It’s just one of these warnings that are more annoying than useful.
The finalizer warning should be gone in a future release (probably 0.9.3). I just felt very nervous about having finalizers quietly fail, since that leads to tempfiles not getting cleaned up, etc. It was a worrisome state of affairs, so the warning seemed warranted.
In the future, we’ll try to provide a mechanism for turning off such “over-cautious” warnings, so they don’t get in the way of other applications working.