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MagLev, Ruby VM on Gemstone OODB, Wows RailsConf

Posted by kdawson on from the rails-oh-i-get-it dept.

murphee ends along a report from InfoQ: "Gemstone demoed [MagLev,] their Ruby VM built on their GemStone S64 VM, to an ecstatic audience. Gemstone's Smalltalk VM allows OODBs of up to 17 PetaBytes, with none of the old ActiveRecord nonsense: the data is persisted transparently. The Gemstone OODB also takes care of any distribution, allowing the Ruby VM and data to scale across many servers (Cheerio, memcached!). There's also an earlier quite technical interview with Gemstone's Bob Walker and Avi Bryant about MagLev."

3 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Great Ruby news by Santana · · Score: 5, Informative

    Maglev is the long awaited (by Rubyists at least) Ruby VM (virtual machine) developed by Gemstone, who also develop an OODB (use Wikipedia for this one, you can do it).

    Railsconf is a good opportunity for Gemstone to show off their object persistence, since it would benefit Ruby on Rails (which uses O/RM that may not be necessary any more.)

    --
    The best way to predict the future is to invent it
  2. Talk really did wow the conference by stockmaster · · Score: 5, Informative

    This talk was one of the highlights of the conference. At the talk, they showed performance benchmarks that included running several things as much as 117x as fast as the default Ruby interpreter that is in use by most Rails installations today. The fact that it's built on this commercial-grade Gemstone platform that has been used for years for high-performance production Smalltalk applications just adds to its credibility.

    One of the reasons this is exciting is that many Ruby/Rails programmers have suffered from the criticism that their platform is elegant and fast to develop in, but that it doesn't scale well. MagLev sure looked like it could go a long way toward addressing those concerns. And since it hits Ruby right at the VM level, it is potentially useful to anyone running any kind of Ruby app whether on Rails or not.

    Of course, we'll see when it's done...

  3. Re:I'm sorry... by pnagel · · Score: 5, Informative

    Basically, GemStone, a company which has been working on large-scale object-oriented database systems and a Smalltalk implementation (GemStone/S)

    You make it sound as if the object oriented database and the Smalltalk implementation are two separate products. Which is a common misconception.

    To oversimplify, GemStone's Smalltalk VM is an OODB. It adds the following features to the language:
        1) Begin transaction, commit transaction, abort transaction.
        2) All of your process space, your global variables, your datastructures etc. are persisted. You can switch power-cycle your computer and have the same program running as used to run before.

    I'm sure they did the same for Ruby with maglev.

    This approach cuts out layers and layers of persistence crap. Bye bye object-relational persistence mapping crud.