Comment by gary4gar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gary4gar | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

    Work on the Ruby interpreter is weirdly silo'ed off and mostly done by Japanese developers, so there's a significant barrier to entry for any enterprising C developer to roll her sleeves up and get hacking.

This is wrong. Ruby Developers welcome contribution in any form. Also, they have various resource to get started:

    Official Contributing Guide: http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.1.1/doc/contributing_rdoc.html
    Ruby Hacking Guide: http://ruby-hacking-guide.github.io/
    Book on ruby internals: http://www.amazon.com/Ruby-Under-Microscope-Illustrated-Internals/dp/1593275277
    RubySpecs: http://rubyspec.org/

Further, incase you are stuck. you can post on the mailing-lists. someone will surely help you get started.

It's entirely possible that it's changed in the last few years, but at the very least what he said was once very true. There has traditionally been a very real and very painful language barrier to the ruby core team.

But, to be fair, it's a bit of a goose and gander kind of situation. People everywhere else in the world have to deal with that kind of situation all the time.

It has, very significantly. There is still a 日本語-only mailing list (ruby-dev), but the English one has significantly more traffic (ruby-core). No decisions are made in ruby-dev that are not also discussed in ruby-core.

In addition, it's only that mailing list that's split; the bugtracker is in English, the help is all in English (with one or two 日本語 translations).

It's actually never been easier to contribute to Ruby.

That's good to hear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com