4 ms·

High Performance Ruby in RPython

43 points by renlinx 12y ago

chrisseaton 12y ago
This is a great project but unfortunately it seems to be dead - no commits since August last year https://github.com/topazproject/topaz https://github.com/topazproject/topaz.
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  That's only 6 months. I don't know if I'd call an obvious research project like this "dead" after that time period. I think there's a difference between "dead" and "not exceptionally active". And I don't think that not being exceptionally active necessarily means anything for the quality of the software; people continue actively use a lot of software that hasn't seen a single patch in years.
- pekk 12y ago
  Do you think they wouldn't take contributions? The licensing is such that if it's really a great project, then even if it were completely abandoned, it would be no big deal to fork it in order to continue development. If it's not so great, of course, it doesn't matter if it's active.
rubyfan 12y ago
Benchmarks?
- chrisseaton 12y ago
  I benchmark Topaz alongside the implementation I work on, JRuby+Truffle, http://www.chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/deoptimizing/benchmarks/ http://www.chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/deoptimizing/benchmar.... To see Topaz at its best, scroll down to Benchmarks and click Synthetic.
  - espadrine 12y ago
    Did you do a FOSDEM talk? Looks like it. Great talk, and great work. Truffle is great, but strangely its documentation is spread all over the Web, one piece on java.net, another on github/jruby's wiki, yet another on uni-linz.ac.at... How does the team work?
    - chrisseaton 12y ago
      JRuby+Truffle is funded by Oracle Labs. There's two full-time employees on it, a PhD student at Linz, and many other people who contribute occasionally or work on libraries we use. Yeah, two of us were at FOSEM. We all work remotely around the world. The documentation is a bit all over the place at the moment, reflecting the different aspects of the project - part academic/industrial research collaboration, part open source product development. We're not trying to get anyone to use it yet, which is why there isn't a single coherent flashy landing page, but we'll get to that in time.
      - rubyfan 12y ago
        How far off do you think that might be? The benchmarks are appealing and the optimizations seem like a no brainer (I know easier said than done). What holds this back from being production ready, more Rspec? Off topic now but Truffle looks slightly more interesting than Topaz.
        chrisseaton 12y ago
        We have to implement the rest of the core library, and we have to implement a lot of the standard library as well. That's a huge task with thousands of methods, but we're using the code from Rubinius for a lot of it and making good progress, so we hope to be able to run some of the simpler web frameworks by RubyConf this year. It may be another year beyond that before I recommend anyone uses it, or it may be sooner.
        rubyfan 12y ago
mathgeek 12y ago
First bullet point on the list of known issues: * Most of the standard library is missing. I don't think "high performance ruby" is very useful without the standard library, personally.
bdcravens 12y ago
This was announced on HN 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177034
overgard 12y ago
I can't remember where I saw it (pypy dev list maybe?) but unfortunately I think the project has been mostly abandoned. Wouldn't hurt for someone to fork it though, it seems like a great idea if someone had the time to move it forward.
marktangotango 12y ago
For anyone interested in learning more about RPython, Laurence Tratt has an indepth blog post here: http://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/fast_enough_vms_in_fast_enough_time http://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/fast_enough_vms_in_fast...
ksec 12y ago
I think Topaz was more of an experiment, For high performance Ruby implementation there are only two left, JRuby + Truffle and RuJIT
- moe 12y ago
  Is anyone running JRuby in production for anything? Every time I tried it out so far it turned out slower than MRI for me. Perhaps I was always hitting on pathological cases, though (tight data processing loops).
  - pselbert 12y ago
    Don't have a citation for this, but I recall hearing that Square runs JRuby in production. Separately, the start time makes JRuby awful for TDD/Dev, but once it has time to warm up in production it is vastly faster. Scan back through some Ruby Rogues episodes, they discuss it a few times in more detail.

43 points by renlinx 12y ago

This is a great project but unfortunately it seems to be dead - no commits since August last year https://github.com/topazproject/topaz https://github.com/topazproject/topaz.

cookiecaper 12y ago
That's only 6 months. I don't know if I'd call an obvious research project like this "dead" after that time period. I think there's a difference between "dead" and "not exceptionally active". And I don't think that not being exceptionally active necessarily means anything for the quality of the software; people continue actively use a lot of software that hasn't seen a single patch in years.
pekk 12y ago
Do you think they wouldn't take contributions? The licensing is such that if it's really a great project, then even if it were completely abandoned, it would be no big deal to fork it in order to continue development. If it's not so great, of course, it doesn't matter if it's active.

rubyfan 12y ago

Benchmarks?

chrisseaton 12y ago
I benchmark Topaz alongside the implementation I work on, JRuby+Truffle, http://www.chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/deoptimizing/benchmarks/ http://www.chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/deoptimizing/benchmar.... To see Topaz at its best, scroll down to Benchmarks and click Synthetic.
- espadrine 12y ago
  Did you do a FOSDEM talk? Looks like it. Great talk, and great work. Truffle is great, but strangely its documentation is spread all over the Web, one piece on java.net, another on github/jruby's wiki, yet another on uni-linz.ac.at... How does the team work?
  - chrisseaton 12y ago
    JRuby+Truffle is funded by Oracle Labs. There's two full-time employees on it, a PhD student at Linz, and many other people who contribute occasionally or work on libraries we use. Yeah, two of us were at FOSEM. We all work remotely around the world. The documentation is a bit all over the place at the moment, reflecting the different aspects of the project - part academic/industrial research collaboration, part open source product development. We're not trying to get anyone to use it yet, which is why there isn't a single coherent flashy landing page, but we'll get to that in time.
    - rubyfan 12y ago
      How far off do you think that might be? The benchmarks are appealing and the optimizations seem like a no brainer (I know easier said than done). What holds this back from being production ready, more Rspec? Off topic now but Truffle looks slightly more interesting than Topaz.
      - chrisseaton 12y ago
        We have to implement the rest of the core library, and we have to implement a lot of the standard library as well. That's a huge task with thousands of methods, but we're using the code from Rubinius for a lot of it and making good progress, so we hope to be able to run some of the simpler web frameworks by RubyConf this year. It may be another year beyond that before I recommend anyone uses it, or it may be sooner.
        rubyfan 12y ago

mathgeek 12y ago

First bullet point on the list of known issues: * Most of the standard library is missing. I don't think "high performance ruby" is very useful without the standard library, personally.

bdcravens 12y ago

This was announced on HN 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177034

overgard 12y ago

I can't remember where I saw it (pypy dev list maybe?) but unfortunately I think the project has been mostly abandoned. Wouldn't hurt for someone to fork it though, it seems like a great idea if someone had the time to move it forward.

marktangotango 12y ago

For anyone interested in learning more about RPython, Laurence Tratt has an indepth blog post here: http://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/fast_enough_vms_in_fast_enough_time http://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/fast_enough_vms_in_fast...

ksec 12y ago

I think Topaz was more of an experiment, For high performance Ruby implementation there are only two left, JRuby + Truffle and RuJIT

moe 12y ago
Is anyone running JRuby in production for anything? Every time I tried it out so far it turned out slower than MRI for me. Perhaps I was always hitting on pathological cases, though (tight data processing loops).
- pselbert 12y ago
  Don't have a citation for this, but I recall hearing that Square runs JRuby in production. Separately, the start time makes JRuby awful for TDD/Dev, but once it has time to warm up in production it is vastly faster. Scan back through some Ruby Rogues episodes, they discuss it a few times in more detail.