Slashdot Mirror
Experimental MacRuby Branch Is 3x Faster
An anonymous reader writes "Zen and the Art of Programming published an article about MacRuby's new experimental 0.5 branch (project blog entry here). According to the included benchmarks, Apple's version of Ruby could already, at this early stage of its development, be about three times as fast as the fastest Ruby implementation available elsewhere."
I heard it made a guy in Michigan's head explode! That's why I stay away from the experimental stuff, man.
Why MacRuby Matters (Present & Future)?
Apparently because an experimental incomplete version of Ruby is fast. Colour me unimpressed.
"LLVM supports effective optimization at compile time, link-time (particularly interprocedural), run-time"
Amazing, truly unique ideas. If only someone had thought of doing this 30 years ago... oh wait...
Of course, the results don't exactly show a "3x speedup"... they show between a 0.08x speedup and a 7.8x speedup, with a high variability. Which is really great for such an early build, but it's not an instant panacea for everything.
E pluribus unum
Every time a story is posted about Ruby performance improvements, someone will post something along the lines of "x times faster than super ultra duper slow is still slow". Even if Ruby is 1000 times faster, there will still be people complaining. My guess is that none of these people actually use Ruby in production to be able to tell how much interpreter performance actually matters in the grand scheme of things.
Er, way to troll? If you'd like to do your ridiculous hello world you can stick to:
puts "i like beans"
And it's really unclear what "it" you're referring to. Because Ruby, for me, is a good blend of the things i wanted from Perl and Lisp with a side of Object Orientation. I get all the laziness and conveniences of Perl, and i can do all the crazy stuff i'd want to do with Lisp. So imo, you're way off base.
There are lives at stake here!
I wonder if this has any connection to what they learned creating the optimized javascript "interpreter" they made for their next generation rendering engine Webkit.
--------
* Sigh *
I agree with this totally. These days I'm writing exclusively in Ruby and it is "fast enough" (even with 1.8.X). In fact, this speed issue is such a big red herring for me. I hardly ever have any issues with speed. Instead I spend most of my optimization time trying to cut down on memory usage.
For me, even an order of magnitude difference in speed (i.e., 10X) isn't going to mean too much. There are certainly places where I'd like my code to be faster, but they are very, very small places. I can easily code them in C if I have to (C/Ruby bindings are *very* easy to write). But honestly, I've never gotten to the point where a speed improvement is more important than a functionality improvement. Every program is different, of course. So not every problem is suited to Ruby.
Sleep(30); /* used to be 90 */
While the Ruby 1.8 VM is quite slow, the YARV VM used in 1.9 is much faster, resulting in similar performance to most other dynamic languages. These tests are showing MacRuby being 3x faster than 1.9, which puts it in "quite fast" territory.
Any sort of layering is a major cause of bugs/slowdown? Quick, throw out TCP/IP. Everyone start using Ethernet frames directly from their apps, even if what you really want to use is SOAP over HTTP over SSL over TCP over IP... I'm not sure how you will get your Ethernet frames past the first router, but I'm sure you will think of something. Damn layering just gets in the way!
These days I'm writing exclusively in Ruby and it is "fast enough" (even with 1.8.X).
I suspect that's because your website doesn't receive thousands of dynamic requests per second.
So, GCC is making what should be technical decisions on a political basis?
Good to know. That's one more reason to be glad when GCC fades away.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
PS: Do you want me to punch you in face? You see, C++ is one of my favorite languages :)
I don't like the feeling of being punched in the face, which is one of the big reasons I don't code in C++ or Java. But if that's your thing, you should keep at it! :)
... for them to get further along in completing it... it'll slow down.
The main effect of GCC for the last 20 years has been to suck all of the air out of the room for anyone else who wanted to develop compilers.
That is one of the most retarded statements I've ever read.
No. What the poster said is true. Also unfair, because GCC is a very useful tool, but it still had a bad influence as well. GCC is extremely useful and produces decent code as well, but it has effectively stifled a lot of C/C++ compiler research. And it seems to become slower with each release. I have a lot of code that was faster with 2.95 than with any 3.x release, and with 4.x it is even slower.
Now, LLVM is still a mixed bag, sometimes code is much faster, sometimes a bit slower, and does not compile everything I throw at it, but it is impressive technology. It has a more modern infrastructure, and finally allows things like compiling to bytecode and dynamic run-time optimisation with C. It may even allow for CPU-independent operating systems in the future, where you have LLVM bytecode in the binaries that will run like natively-compiled code once loaded.
I compiled some C programs _to_ LLVM bytecode and then ran them on my mac.
Their performance was comparable, oftentimes better, than that of the same programs compiled with a recent GCC. And I can still add inline assembler, which then is used only on the right architecture, if I provide C alternatives.
Think about this. This has the potential of *finally* freeing us from dependence on a CPU ISA. It may be an Apple-sponsored project, but we all should be grateful to them that they are actually pushing it.
Roberto
"Thanks, Captain Anecdote, but you've left out even the anecdotal evidence. What's all this exclusive writing you're doing with Ruby? I've been doing all my grocery list work in Ruby too, and it's *totally* fast enough."
I'm not the GP, but New York Times, MTV, Aboutus.com (high-ranking Alexa site), Yellow Pages, are all running Ruby. I'd love to give you even more examples but I've signed NDAs.
"I think Ruby is a fantastic language, but then I see comments like this modded up to 5 that are completely nonsensical. This makes Ruby fandom seem more like Java 1999, which makes me think twice about my positive opinion of it."
I can say the same thing about comments that complain about Ruby's speed without providing any kind evidence that the interpreter's speed is the bottleneck in their application. This makes it seem like bashing Ruby is just the latest fad, which makes it very hard for me to take any of these complaints seriously. If you cry wolf several times then nobody will listen to you anymore.