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Experimental MacRuby Branch Is 3x Faster

Posted by kdawson on from the deep-red-cocoa dept.

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."

15 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. That's because it's spiked with assembly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I heard it made a guy in Michigan's head explode! That's why I stay away from the experimental stuff, man.

  2. Why MacRuby Matters? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why MacRuby Matters (Present & Future)?

    Apparently because an experimental incomplete version of Ruby is fast. Colour me unimpressed.

    1. Re:Why MacRuby Matters? by NoTheory · · Score: 4, Insightful

      MacRuby matters for a lot of reasons. Early benchmarks aren't one of them. http://blog.headius.com/2009/03/on-benchmarking.html

      MacRuby's potential for Cocoa integration is fantastic and great, and something i very very much want to see.

      It's not clear however what relationship benchmarks at this stage (with an incomplete implementation) will actually correspond to in the future. They are a total red herring for discussion.

      Look at MacRuby on the merits! not the benchmarks!

      --
      There are lives at stake here!
    2. Re:Why MacRuby Matters? by Artuir · · Score: 5, Funny

      Whenever I read posts like these I start to wonder if I accidentally walked into a Starbucks.

    3. Re:Why MacRuby Matters? by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 4, Funny

      I suspect that someday in a future version of the Mac OS, Ruby will be a first-class language for application development alongside or perhaps replacing Objective-C.

      Wouldn't that require Ruby being a first-class development language in the first place? ;)

      Yeah, yeah, go on and mod me troll, I can handle it.

    4. Re:Why MacRuby Matters? by tyrione · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well, if you ask me, I suspect that someday in a future version of the Mac OS, Ruby will be a first-class language for application development alongside or perhaps replacing Objective-C. I think Apple likes Ruby and its aesthetic. A lot of the Rails devs are Mac developers, and I think that's where it sparked.

      First Class, maybe. Replacing ObjC? You're prediction makes LSD trips seem dull.

    5. Re:Why MacRuby Matters? by Macthorpe · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah, yeah, go on and mod me troll, I can handle it.

      Alright then!

      Wait a minute...

      Shit.

      --
      "It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
  3. Yeah , a true renaissance by Viol8 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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...

  4. Re:LLVM strikes again. by samkass · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  5. Re:The questions remains... by FooBarWidget · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:Ruby? by NoTheory · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!
  7. Re:The questions remains... by wrook · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  8. How they did it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sleep(30); /* used to be 90 */

  9. Re:The questions remains... by Otterley · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  10. Re:true, but seems unnecessary by Tumbleweed · · Score: 4, Funny

    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! :)