5 ms·

Rubinius 1.2.0 released (it's an implementation of Ruby)

68 points by indy 16y ago

timmorgan 16y ago
Can someone give me a short synopsis of why one might want to use Rubinius over YARV?
- evanphx 16y ago
  Rubinius can run pure ruby code much faster than YARV because of things like a better GC and the ability to compile ruby code down to machine code (a JIT compiler). Rubinius is much easier to work and understand than YARV because much of the core functionality is written in Ruby itself. This lends itself to being easier to hack on and add features to.
  - kkowalczyk 16y ago
    But is it actually faster? Rubinius homepage claims that it's fast but has no benchmark results that I could find, which makes it hard to take those claims seriously. I like the way JavaScript engines are being compared using two or three standard benchmarks. (to pre-empt "benchmarks are useless" comments: yes, benchmarks are flawed because they only measure what they measure, but a decent benchmark is better than no benchmark).
    - wgj 16y ago
      You might find this interesting: http://programmingzen.com/2010/07/19/the-great-ruby-shootout-july-2010/ http://programmingzen.com/2010/07/19/the-great-ruby-shootout... It shows 1.9.2 to be a bit faster most of the time, and to have a smaller footprint. Still, Rubinius could be the better choice in some cases. The best thing is to run your own perf tests specific to your application, and rvm makes that head to head comparison easier to carry out.
    - technomancy 16y ago
      > But is it actually faster? It's much faster at executing pure-ruby code. Since it has a much smaller portion implemented in C, total execution time may or may not be slower than YARV; it depends on the execution profile of the task at hand. Code that spends most of its time in things that YARV does in C will be slower on Rubinius.
railsjedi 16y ago
Any word on 1.9 syntax support? Sorry, I havent been keeping up on Rubinius progress recently. I've switched all my projects to 1.9 syntax though so going back to 1.8 would be kind of a drag.
- evanphx 16y ago
  1.9 is next big feature being worked on. The multiverse branch has the start of it, and speed is going to pick up on it in the new year.
kingkilr 16y ago
Congrats Evan, great work.
mark_l_watson 16y ago
I switched to Rubinius earlier this year for day-to-day development. Good project and deserves to be supported. One issue for me however that is also the case for JRuby is that much more memory is usually used than with Ruby 1.9.2. If you need several Ruby processes running on a low end server to support a web app then memory footprint size is important. All that said, I love the idea of Rubinius and it is an important project.

68 points by indy 16y ago

timmorgan 16y ago

Can someone give me a short synopsis of why one might want to use Rubinius over YARV?

evanphx 16y ago
Rubinius can run pure ruby code much faster than YARV because of things like a better GC and the ability to compile ruby code down to machine code (a JIT compiler). Rubinius is much easier to work and understand than YARV because much of the core functionality is written in Ruby itself. This lends itself to being easier to hack on and add features to.
- kkowalczyk 16y ago
  But is it actually faster? Rubinius homepage claims that it's fast but has no benchmark results that I could find, which makes it hard to take those claims seriously. I like the way JavaScript engines are being compared using two or three standard benchmarks. (to pre-empt "benchmarks are useless" comments: yes, benchmarks are flawed because they only measure what they measure, but a decent benchmark is better than no benchmark).
  - wgj 16y ago
    You might find this interesting: http://programmingzen.com/2010/07/19/the-great-ruby-shootout-july-2010/ http://programmingzen.com/2010/07/19/the-great-ruby-shootout... It shows 1.9.2 to be a bit faster most of the time, and to have a smaller footprint. Still, Rubinius could be the better choice in some cases. The best thing is to run your own perf tests specific to your application, and rvm makes that head to head comparison easier to carry out.
  - technomancy 16y ago
    > But is it actually faster? It's much faster at executing pure-ruby code. Since it has a much smaller portion implemented in C, total execution time may or may not be slower than YARV; it depends on the execution profile of the task at hand. Code that spends most of its time in things that YARV does in C will be slower on Rubinius.

railsjedi 16y ago

Any word on 1.9 syntax support? Sorry, I havent been keeping up on Rubinius progress recently. I've switched all my projects to 1.9 syntax though so going back to 1.8 would be kind of a drag.

evanphx 16y ago
1.9 is next big feature being worked on. The multiverse branch has the start of it, and speed is going to pick up on it in the new year.

kingkilr 16y ago

Congrats Evan, great work.

mark_l_watson 16y ago

I switched to Rubinius earlier this year for day-to-day development. Good project and deserves to be supported. One issue for me however that is also the case for JRuby is that much more memory is usually used than with Ruby 1.9.2. If you need several Ruby processes running on a low end server to support a web app then memory footprint size is important. All that said, I love the idea of Rubinius and it is an important project.