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Rubinius 1.0 (Fabius) Released

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Re: Rubinius 1.0 (Fabius) Released

#22

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?

For pure ruby code you write yourself with your own classes and while loops and algorithms and whatnot, rubinius can be up to 20 times faster then MRI. But there are still some corner cases where it is slower. So micro benchmarks rubinius kicks ass over almost all the rubies. But macro is still has some spots to polish.

The reason for this is that core things like Hash and String and Array are written in pure ruby. And they are only like 1.5 times slower then the C impls in the other rubies. This means that it is optimized for running ruby code really fast, this means that once the edge cases are gone, rubinius will smoke all the other rubies hands down.

Re: Rubinius 1.0 (Fabius) Released

#24

This is my favorite project we have at Engine Yard. I've been rooting for it and fighting to keep it alive for years now because I know that this is the future of ruby. Evan and Brian and all the contributors have done great work on this ambitious project. I've had ruby aliased to rbx on my own personal laptop and run all of my development on rbx, I only have to bust out MRI every once in a while, like once a month.…

what is the performance as compared to Enterprise Edition ?

Re: Rubinius 1.0 (Fabius) Released

#25
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/rubinius-dev , though it hasn't taken off much yet. Perhaps now that 1.0 is out people will use it more. Blog wise, what would you like to see on a Rubinius blog?

Would love to see a big fat link on the front page that says "Help make the best Ruby implementation ever. Join us!" with a link to the google group. Clear call to action. Blog wise: Bubble up some of the great activity going on behind the scenes. Design decisions, great implementation debates, calls for help on hard/easy problems, new releases, beta releases, testing calls, etc. The posts don't have to be more than…

I think now that we've hit 1.0, the path forward is easy to break up into bits could be on the blog. Before the 1.0-rc cycle, it was hard to separate out individual things.

Given that people think this is a good idea, I think we'll go ahead and do it!

Re: Rubinius 1.0 (Fabius) Released

#26
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Better question: What happens if companies like google start eyeballing it and putting some real money behind it.

You mean the same Google where Python beat Ruby years ago?

Re: Rubinius 1.0 (Fabius) Released

#27

This is my favorite project we have at Engine Yard. I've been rooting for it and fighting to keep it alive for years now because I know that this is the future of ruby. Evan and Brian and all the contributors have done great work on this ambitious project. I've had ruby aliased to rbx on my own personal laptop and run all of my development on rbx, I only have to bust out MRI every once in a while, like once a month.…

what is the performance as compared to Enterprise Edition ?

Its a totally different beast, not an apples to apples comparison.

EE is simply a patched MRI, so it will be faster on strings (known issues with rbx), but rbx has generation GC and JIT which can only improve.

Right now in my limited testing the performance is a wash, but if your app is memory hungry the improved GC is worth it alone. If your app is CPU heavy the JIT becomes your friend. The only way to be sure its to test it (how about running your test suite on it?), but I suspect rbx is going to get very fast as soon as a few big players shift on to it and the sweet spots for the tuning knobs are discovered.

Re: Rubinius 1.0 (Fabius) Released

#29
post #8

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.

Was going to say the same thing. Just looked through the site trying to find exactly what it is, and all I got is: 1. It's a Ruby implementation. 2. It's mostly compatible w/ Ruby & its components (Rails, gems, etc.) but not completely. 3. ... ? An About page would be nice - answer these questions, among others: 1. What is Rubinious? 2. What differentiates it from Ruby? 3. What problems does it solve? 4. Why would Ru…

I'm so clueless as you.

From http://rubini.us you can read "An environment for Ruby, the programming language that provides performance balanced with accessibility, focusing on improving programming productivity"

The thing is, in this context, what is "an environment for ruby"?

Re: Rubinius 1.0 (Fabius) Released

#30
post #8

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.

Here's Wayne Seguin's take on Rubinius (he's the developer behind rvm, and he puts it nicely, I think):

Rubinius is a ruby interpreter written in C++ using many advanced techniques and technologies such as LLVM, a "precise, compacting, generational garbage collector", a compatible C extension api to standard MRI Ruby and many other awesome ideas that will give any language nut a huge nerdon.

(from http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/interpreters/rbx/)

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