JRubyConf and invokedynamic

Last weekend I attended JRubyConf 2009. Overall I enjoyed the opening JRubyConf State of the Union, the follow-up JRuby on Rails, and the concluding JRuby Core Team Panel sessions the best. Despite browsing the JRuby mailing list as part of my daily routine, JRuby has a rapid development cycle; these sessions helped me get a clearer view of the JRuby team's current development goals.

I am curious when and how JRuby will take advantage of the invokedynamic and method handle technologies coming with the next Java platform release. After reading John Rose's paper Bytecodes meet Combinators: invokedynamic on the JVM, it sounds like language implementors will need to make a significant development investment if they want to fully utilize the new features. Charles clearly has a strong grasp on the new features. He's already tried out and given feedback on them, so I'm sure he'll be on the forefront of an implementation changeover. Still, I wonder what kind of timeframe we're looking at to go from the simulated method dispatching we have now to a fully fleshed out invokedynamic-backed implementation.