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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.
"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
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
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
its a single data cloud instance on a distributed data system, in that respect its similar to products like Amazons SDB and Google's BigTable systems. The data is virtualised across a number of data stores. A lot of telecos use gemstone, its used a lot in financials. Its a True OODBMS which is exactly the model that the ORM layers in frameworks like rails are attempting to simulate on a relational database. OODBMS systems match the datamodel of modern web frameworks closer than any relational system every will do. Other Commercial OODBMS systems are system such as ObjectStore, POET, there a few opensource ones such as GOODS
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!
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*
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.