Compiling Ruby to machine language

Post by reactordev » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 1:33 PM UTC

atherton94027 wrote: post #23

pizza234 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VB6 deserves the huge popularity it had, but the reason wasn't because of the language design, rather, its (extremely) rapid GUI application development. It was actually a two-edged sword - it facilitated writing spaghetti code. > You could do basically everything that you could do in languages like C/C++ As long as there is some form of memory access, any language can do basically everything that one can do in C/C++…

> As long as there is some form of memory access, any language can do basically everything that one can do in C/C++, but this doesn't make much sense. No VB6 had really easy COM integration which let you tap into a lot of Windows system components. The same code in C++ often required hundreds of lines of scaffolding, and I'm not exaggerating

Post by jlarocco » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 2:46 PM UTC

moltopoco wrote: post #38

jlarocco wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you can still use Objective-C, but MacRuby stopped being updated around 2011, and I don't know how well it'd support newer versions of OSX. I dropped OSX long ago, so can't even try it out any more. I wonder how much of the LLVM bits could be reused? I'm sure LLVM's changed a bunch in the last 15 years, too.

My understanding is that MacRuby relied on Apple's ill-fated attempts to migrate from reference counting to regular garbage collection. I would be surprised if GC still worked on modern arm64 macOS. RubyMotion later adopted ARC but then it's not really Ruby anymore.

Post by igouy » Tue, Nov 18, 2025, 5:03 PM UTC

pansa2 wrote: post #26

pmarreck wrote: post #16

How fast is Ruby, lately? I haven't used it in about 10 years

> How fast is Ruby, lately? I did recent testing that showed it to be faster than Python but slower than Lua: Lua, Ruby and Python ran my benchmark in 12, 18 and 25 seconds respectively. This was measured using the latest versions of each language (5.4, 3.4 and 3.13), using only the interpreters, no JITs. > I haven't used it in about 10 years It looks like the relative performance of the three languages hasn't change…