[FooBarWidget]

Your response sounds dangerously close to what pro-software patents advocates would say. Just because someone else has written software which does the same thing doesn't mean that you couldn't have discovered the same method independently.

In case of this patch, even the author himself says that Ruby 1.9 doesn't do stack copying. He's not "explaining as if he discovered it himself".

[derefr]

I'm not implying any malicious intent here; the author obviously didn't look at the 1.9 codebase and go "how can I pretend this is mine?" All I'm saying is that there has been a lot of independent discovery of Ruby 1.9-equivalent performance enhancements lately, is all, and this seems like a bit of a useless thing to do.

It seems that the techniques these bloggers are discovering have already been figured out, or at least equalled (in this case bettered, apparently) by the 1.9 team. I'd say fewer people should be working on enhancing 1.8 if they could just back-port the enhancements that already exist from 1.9. Instead, if they actually want to optimize something, start with the codebase that doesn't have huge, obvious, already-solved(!) performance flaws to begin with, and then backport the new optimizations you find.