When starting a new project, one of the first things we ask ourselves is what language we should use. This question doesn’t have an absolute answer, and we often find ourselves facing even more questions, such as: Do we want a language that is object oriented? Should we opt only for languages with garbage collectors? Is being able to interact directly with memory important to us? Does the language have popular and well maintained frameworks that match our specific needs? Do we care more about readability or performance?

If you’ve ever found yourself wanting to choose Ruby, but are hesitating because it’s interpreted and performance might suffer - or if you simply want to hear more about JRuby - this talk is for you.

In this talk I will dive into why you should - or shouldn’t - use JRuby in your upcoming projects. We’ll compare the language to Ruby and other JVM languages, discuss its limitations and restrictions, and even dive into how such a strange concoction of languages came to be.