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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."

1 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Ruby Shootout by cryptoluddite · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The MagLev VM, although only partially implemented, so far outperforms MRI 1.8. Being 'faster than 1.8' is a pretty weak claim compared to the competition:

    Ruby 1.9: 3.32x
    XRuby: 1.43x
    JRuby: 1.32x
    Ruby 1.8: 1.0x
    Rubinius: 0.73x
    Ruby.NET: 0.56x

    What is cool is how well the Java-based Ruby implementations do: JRuby and XRuby. JRuby was the only Ruby implementation that did not have any tests error. For a VM that is supposedly so hostile to dynamic languages, those implementations were faster and more reliable than the actual Ruby VM and cleaned the floor with the CLR/.NET implementation. And the next version of Java should have stack allocations and invokedynamic bytecode and other optimizations.

    What this shows to me is, first do one thing well (Java), then figure out how to grow it. In contrast to .NET/CLR which started out trying to do everything and ended up doing few things well.