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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."

9 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. I'm sorry... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What?

    1. 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.
  2. An audience that needs ... by Marbleless · · Score: 5, Funny

    >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.
  3. Sad . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    > 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.

  4. 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
  5. 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...

  6. 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.
  7. Re:Shot in the dark by noidentity · · Score: 5, Funny

    Just yesterday I was working on SuperCollider, hooking it with OilRig, implemented with SuperTanker, using ConcreteRoad as the substrate. I had some problems with the DeepSea module, but it was really due to RadioAntenna. You're confused? These are just the names of some database libraries, nothing to do with what their names imply.

  8. news that matters? by nguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.