In comments, Sun's Charles Nutter hints that JRuby may ship by the end of year. Or he may be taking a swipe at the Perl 6 guys: you decide. Ruby on at least one of the two major managed platforms: huge for Ruby. (In that post, I caution that it took Jim Hugunin something like 2 years to move IronPython through beta to 1.0. Nutter and Thomas Enebo, the core JRuby developers, only joined Sun two months ago. A year-end release would be pretty darn impressive!)