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Rubinius 1.0 (Fabius) Released

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Re: Rubinius 1.0 (Fabius) Released

#3

Post by jon_dahl »

GrandMasterBirt wrote: post #2

Cool. Is Rubinius faster than 1.8.6 or even 1.9? Was that the goal? Or is it just a 1.0 milestone where the project is compatible enough to meet the 1.8.6 ruby language spec and native libs?

The biggest goal, at least a few years ago, was to have a Ruby that is substantially implemented in Ruby, as opposed to being a hundred thousand lines of C under the hood. Paradoxically, this can result in speedups, since it's easier to optimize expressive, well-written code. Avi Bryant gave a talk at RailsConf a few years ago about how Smalltalk contains all the "features" of Ruby that are usually blamed for its performance woes, but still managed to be pretty fast. It's not the language features that keeps Ruby slow; it's the opaque implementation.

Re: Rubinius 1.0 (Fabius) Released

#5

Post by sreque »

GrandMasterBirt wrote: post #2

Cool. Is Rubinius faster than 1.8.6 or even 1.9? Was that the goal? Or is it just a 1.0 milestone where the project is compatible enough to meet the 1.8.6 ruby language spec and native libs?

I just did a quick test of 1.9 vs rubinius on the alioth pidigits and btrees benchmarks, and rubinius was 1.5 times as slow on pidigits and twice as slow on btrees. In addition, the release notes state that they are aware that several string operations in Rubinius are currently slower than their MRI 1.8 equivalents.

I'm excited that rubinius is out, but I'm not sure at the moment what it's advantages are versus MRI in terms of practical use.

Re: Rubinius 1.0 (Fabius) Released

#6

Post by evanphx »

sreque wrote: post #5
GrandMasterBirt wrote: post #2

Cool. Is Rubinius faster than 1.8.6 or even 1.9? Was that the goal? Or is it just a 1.0 milestone where the project is compatible enough to meet the 1.8.6 ruby language spec and native libs?

I just did a quick test of 1.9 vs rubinius on the alioth pidigits and btrees benchmarks, and rubinius was 1.5 times as slow on pidigits and twice as slow on btrees. In addition, the release notes state that they are aware that several string operations in Rubinius are currently slower than their MRI 1.8 equivalents. I'm excited that rubinius is out, but I'm not sure at the moment what it's advantages are versus MRI i…

This seems pretty accurate given the kind of performance we've seen thus far. One thing to understand about Rubinius is that we've optimized it to the hilt for running Ruby code. So when you see Rubinius performing, say, 1.5x slower than MRI on a particular String method, what you're seeing is Rubinius running ruby at 1.5x slower than C code. If you compare Rubinius to MRI both running pure ruby code, you'll see Rubinius shine. It's getting the performance of the methods that MRI implements in C that we still have work to do on. This is part of the strategy of the project, because it means that we're improving the performance of all ruby code, thus raising the bar not for just one method but for the whole program.

Re: Rubinius 1.0 (Fabius) Released

#7

Post by nkassis »

jon_dahl wrote: post #3
GrandMasterBirt wrote: post #2

Cool. Is Rubinius faster than 1.8.6 or even 1.9? Was that the goal? Or is it just a 1.0 milestone where the project is compatible enough to meet the 1.8.6 ruby language spec and native libs?

The biggest goal, at least a few years ago, was to have a Ruby that is substantially implemented in Ruby, as opposed to being a hundred thousand lines of C under the hood. Paradoxically, this can result in speedups, since it's easier to optimize expressive, well-written code. Avi Bryant gave a talk at RailsConf a few years ago about how Smalltalk contains all the "features" of Ruby that are usually blamed for its per…

I think they are on the right track. Given that this is a 3 year old project, I don't think we can compare it to smalltalk implementation with years of development. I wonder how well it would compare to something like pypy and other similar projects.

Re: Rubinius 1.0 (Fabius) Released

#8

Post by bruceba »

One thing I'd appreciate with these kinds of announcements is a "what is it" paragraph preferably towards the top of the referenced web page. I suppose if I were working in Ruby I'd know what Rubinius is and why I'd care but a list of "what is new" doesn't particularly help me or folk like me.
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