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MagLev, Ruby VM on Gemstone OODB, Wows RailsConf
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."
What?
>Gemstone demoed [MagLev,] their Ruby VM built on their GemStone S64 VM, to an ecstatic audience.
...
;)
An audience that needs
a) to buy some vowels, and
b) to find significant others to get ecstatic about!
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
> murphee ends along a report from InfoQ
I am sorry to hear of murphee's death, and hope that no more lives are claimed by this report's incomprehensibility.
I didn't even know this was a topic being discussed. In other news, git is cool.
That has got to be the worst summary line I've ever read in the history of slashdot.
"MagLev, Ruby VM on Gemstone OODB, Wows RailsConf"
Some magnetic levitation involving rubies, VM (Ware?), more gems, object oriented databases (didn't they die?), World of Warcraft, rails (magnetic levitation again?), and, finally, conference.
Doesn't the Lameness Filter usually take care of this sort of thing?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Independent results will be coming soon, as outlined here.
After I was confused by the headline I thought to myself, "Well the summary will clarify all that up for me"
After I read the summary I thought to myself, "I still don't understand and I'll be damed if me and the four Pale Ales in mah belly give a good Goddamn to RTFA!"
--I'm not talking about dance lessons. I'm talking about putting a brick through the other guy's windshield.-
I might trust non open source mission critical programs from Oracle, Cisco, and if you got me drunk enough some Microsoft products. But for something new from a previously unknown company, I'm not going to be the early adopter. Lets see twitter do it first, then I'll think about it more seriously.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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
Pro-homosexual KKep uunecessary Successes with the
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...
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
Neither the summary nor TFA inspired me with awe. Guess I'm losing it.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Avi Bryant gave a fascinating talk about bringing technology developed for Smalltalk into the Ruby world at RailsConf 2007. Apropos of nothing, he bears an uncanny resemblance to Jeremy Davies (Daniel Faraday on "Lost").
Basically he's saying that many of the performance issues with the much-maligned Ruby VM were solved years ago in Smalltalk implementations, and that Ruby ought to incorporate those ideas. Maglev is a big step in this direction.
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
I've used Zope a bit (which is Python based, see zope.org), but haven't touched Ruby or Rails yet. This seems to be an alternative to an object-relational mapper for Rails. Since Zope has used an object database from day 1 (iirc), I'd tend to think it would be better and/or cleaner. Anyone that's used both care to compare the two?
-chris
From Wikipedia (yeah it's not a source that's reliable at all, but this is the internet): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev
"Magnetic levitation, maglev, or magnetic suspension is a method by which an object is suspended with no support other than magnetic fields. The electromagnetic force is used to counteract the effects of the gravitational force."
If they're doing *that* with code, I'll be hell of impressed. If not, that's a pretty strange way to brand your project/product/language/whatever that is. Seriously, I'm sure it's awesome, but what is it with all these things (MagLev, Ruby, etc) trying to sound cool by appropriating names of other, already well-established 'things'?
Or next am I going to be using "Ice-cream, Santa Claus on Purple Monkey OODB with Cowboy Hat and Kitchen Fork to PWN the OMGWTFBBQ on the MBA with the XKCD in the Ballroom with the Candlestick"?
Seriously, these names are getting silly.
Not that 'Linux' or 'Ubuntu' or 'MySQL' sound any less silly to people not familiar with them, but at least they're not likely to be confusing or confused for something else.
*/minirant*
I thought the OODBMS fad was finally dead. OODB's resurrect many of the problematic ideas that drove Dr. Codd to formulate relational to begin with. Thus, they could be considered a step backwards. But this would start a paradigm Holy War here and we don't want that, do we?
Table-ized A.I.
You mean like the open source Zope (written in Python), invented over 10 years ago? Great, now I can tie my open source language to a closed-source object store.
Gemstone is a proprietary implementation of Smalltalk and an associated object database. Who does it matter to whether they incorporate a RubyVM into their system or not?
Gemstone also stands for the failure of a particular kind of business model. These people (and others) had a mature OO programming language that was orders of magnitude faster than Ruby, had object persistence, had a great IDE, and supported distributed programming over 15 years ago, and they pissed it all away by making it too expensive and too proprietary.
Because the Smalltalk vendors were greedy and squabbling among themselves, modern OOP arrived more than a decade later in in much poorer form.
I suppose hiding their Smalltalk heritage by calling their system "Gemstone/S" and being forced to incorporate Ruby in order to make their platform attractive is the ultimate indignity.
The first language I learned was BASIC. (I almost learned 8080 assembler and half-learned TI calculator about a year before that, but didn't quite get there.)
After that, I started learning 6800 assembler the bottom-up way (playing with a prototyping board with a monitor/debug ROM). Wired a BASIC onto the board, but I wanted a high-level language. I took Pascal and ForTran at the same time, IIRC, at the local college, and the professor mentioned that I might be able to find a FORTH to load onto it. (He also recommended a floppy drive, which recommendation I studiously ignored.) I got a listing of a 6800 implementation of fig-FORTH and loaded it by hand (saved it to tape). Learned CoBOL and RPG (Report Program Generator, not Role Playing Game) in the meantime.
I thought I understood programming after that. Went to the big U and ended up in CS. (Stupid move.) Learned C and became unable to program in a timely manner. Had to re-implement FORTH in 6809 to finally graduate.
I'm not sure whether it was C that screwed me up or FORTH.
I know I can't program CoBOL any more, and I know that I have lost more than one job because of the time I spent learning to use the tools of C to build modular programs in college. Can't program CoBOL because it's just too much work to convince myself to keep track of all the games you have to play to emulate locality of reference in CoBOL to get UI screens to respond reasonably to user input. I also have problems working with legacy C source code built by high-school-grads who are untrained in modularization, etc., and are plenty willing to burn themselves out keeping track of thousands of globals while churning out close to a thousand lines of C a day. (Copy-paste and change a few globals that should have been parameters, etc.) The code the other guys wrote reminded me of nothing more than CoBOL. Couldn't compete, either, when the managers wanted me to pump out the same number of the same kinds of lines and somehow "add in" the value of my advanced degree.
(huh? This industry is crazy. Mad. Kind of like the rest of the world, I guess.)
I like FORTH. I don't really know much about Smalltalk, except what I may have absorbed studying Objective C and playing with Squeak, but I don't buy it when anyone argues in favor of complicated languages. It seems to me that they (you?) are primarily arguing the equivalent of that C should be written like CoBOL, according to some baroque set of inherited rules that probably had more to do with the tools that were once (but are no longer being) commonly used than with the problem being solved.
So, what are you saying? Is high-school algebra, with its precedence rules, the best algebra, just because modern mathematicians have used it for a long time (until, of course, they dig into the really useful stuff)?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
that slashdot has really gone downhill. Next thing I'll hear is that you all have girlfriends.
Sorry for the lecture in Central-European geography, but you were thinking of Polish notation.
Hungarian is something different altogether. You don't want to know.
I used Gemstone back in the Smalltalk days. It is very nice technology, but also very expensive and proprietary. It is the ultimate vendor lock-in. I won't touch it with a 10-foot pole.
Fewer warts than ruby, and fast runtimes already exist. ;)
;)
The problem is that OODBMs aren't as easy to query using arbitrary queries. You can't easily say "Give me all sales in the last 6 months with totals > $100,000".
It does seem that Gemstone supports a RDBMS bridge, so for OLAP style operations, you can extract the needed data to a RDBMS for further processing/reporting/querying. Of course, perhaps something like a Map/Reduce process could be used to extract data as well.
This also will not necessarily replace MemCache. Gemstone is a database, and still persists to disk. So latency/contenion issues still apply.
It looks like offer something called "GemFire" that runs on top of Gemstone that may provide this kind of caching.
One thing to also remember, is that Gemstone/S is probably not cheap. It has "Enterprise" all over it...