One of the things I've most appreciated about the JRuby community is that bugs get fixed in a hurry. My first experience with JRuby was trying it, something not working, jumping into IRC to ask about it, and headius had it diagnosed and patched 10 minutes later. From then on I was hooked.
The other major thing I like about JRuby is that it's much easier to hack on than MRI - the Java code is extremely clean and easy to understand, and it's easy to use tools like IntelliJ's debugger to diagnose issues quickly and easily. I've contributed dozens of commits to JRuby specifically because the barrier to entry is just a lot lower than it is in MRI.
The community is really, really good, and the project is extremely hackable - it's an embodiment of the best in open source, IMO, and I'm really excited for this release in the hopes that it gets more people using it.
The other major thing I like about JRuby is that it's much easier to hack on than MRI - the Java code is extremely clean and easy to understand, and it's easy to use tools like IntelliJ's debugger to diagnose issues quickly and easily. I've contributed dozens of commits to JRuby specifically because the barrier to entry is just a lot lower than it is in MRI.
The community is really, really good, and the project is extremely hackable - it's an embodiment of the best in open source, IMO, and I'm really excited for this release in the hopes that it gets more people using it.