4 ms·

Right, but you can also get that same 5x increase from writing something using a higher level language running on the JVM or BEAM. You don't need to go full on

by rozap 9y ago

Right, but you can also get that same 5x increase from writing something using a higher level language running on the JVM or BEAM. You don't need to go full on "systems programming" to have something that outperforms Ruby.

jashmatthews 9y ago
MRI Ruby and BEAM are both bytecode VMs. There's no simple 5x increase in performance there. BEAM is register based, and YARV is stack based, so BEAM tends to be a little faster. The JVM is a completely different beast. Thanks to improvements in the JVM for hosting dynamic languages, JRuby is able to offer some serious performance advantages over MRI Ruby, and I'm really excited about TruffleRuby.
- hardwaresofton 9y ago
  Just to confirm why this is getting downvoted -- I'm guessing the MRI vs BEAM statement is super wrong? I can't say I know much about erlang's VM but being "bytecode VMs" I don't think MRI the same as BEAM, nevermind the primary paradigms they service being completely different. I assume JRuby is faster than MRI Ruby (at least for parallelizable tasks), so I can't imagine the second statement being wrong per say... Also I'd never heard of TruffleRuby, and call me prejudiced, but I don't want to be anywhere near anything developed by Oracle, whether it's oracle labs or not (I hadn't heard about GraalVM before). Speaking of fast ruby... I'm surprised no efforts to make ruby faster/swap out MRI haven't panned out. In python land I know there are efforts like pypy and pypy+stm tackling the slowness and GIL problems while maintaining axiomatic use of the language.
  - jashmatthews 9y ago
    I'm not sure why this is downvoted so hard because it's true. BEAM has massive advantages over MRI Ruby/Cython for concurrency and parallelism but not really much in sheer throughput. For example, Sinatra + Sequel on MRI has a 50% lead in throughput over Phoenix + Elixir on BEAM here: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r15&hw=ph&test=fortune&l=hos0zj&f=zijxtr-zik0zj-zik0zj-zik0zj-zhxjwf-zijunz-zik0zj-cn3 https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r15&hw=... Bytecode VMs all have the same fundamental problem with instruction dispatch overhead, regardless of what language or paradigm they're supporting, which is why JIT is so important even though it's so much additional complexity. JRuby is now 2-3x faster in general as the JVM improved support for hosting dynamic languages, and it's in heavy production use at places like TalkDesk, so in that sense it is the "faster Ruby". There's also Topaz, which is Ruby built using the underlying framework of PyPy, but performance is disappointing AFAIK.

by rozap 9y ago

jashmatthews 9y ago

MRI Ruby and BEAM are both bytecode VMs. There's no simple 5x increase in performance there. BEAM is register based, and YARV is stack based, so BEAM tends to be a little faster. The JVM is a completely different beast. Thanks to improvements in the JVM for hosting dynamic languages, JRuby is able to offer some serious performance advantages over MRI Ruby, and I'm really excited about TruffleRuby.

hardwaresofton 9y ago
Just to confirm why this is getting downvoted -- I'm guessing the MRI vs BEAM statement is super wrong? I can't say I know much about erlang's VM but being "bytecode VMs" I don't think MRI the same as BEAM, nevermind the primary paradigms they service being completely different. I assume JRuby is faster than MRI Ruby (at least for parallelizable tasks), so I can't imagine the second statement being wrong per say... Also I'd never heard of TruffleRuby, and call me prejudiced, but I don't want to be anywhere near anything developed by Oracle, whether it's oracle labs or not (I hadn't heard about GraalVM before). Speaking of fast ruby... I'm surprised no efforts to make ruby faster/swap out MRI haven't panned out. In python land I know there are efforts like pypy and pypy+stm tackling the slowness and GIL problems while maintaining axiomatic use of the language.
- jashmatthews 9y ago
  I'm not sure why this is downvoted so hard because it's true. BEAM has massive advantages over MRI Ruby/Cython for concurrency and parallelism but not really much in sheer throughput. For example, Sinatra + Sequel on MRI has a 50% lead in throughput over Phoenix + Elixir on BEAM here: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r15&hw=ph&test=fortune&l=hos0zj&f=zijxtr-zik0zj-zik0zj-zik0zj-zhxjwf-zijunz-zik0zj-cn3 https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r15&hw=... Bytecode VMs all have the same fundamental problem with instruction dispatch overhead, regardless of what language or paradigm they're supporting, which is why JIT is so important even though it's so much additional complexity. JRuby is now 2-3x faster in general as the JVM improved support for hosting dynamic languages, and it's in heavy production use at places like TalkDesk, so in that sense it is the "faster Ruby". There's also Topaz, which is Ruby built using the underlying framework of PyPy, but performance is disappointing AFAIK.