6 ms·

InfraRuby 3.7 – Compiler and runtime for statically-typed Ruby

70 points by MrBra 11y ago

ankurpatel 11y ago
Finally a solution that can makes Rails more competitive
- pjonesdotca 11y ago
  Wait what? To whom?
- vidarh 11y ago
  If you can find anyone willing to port Rails to a statically typed subset that requires adding type annotations and also porting every single gem it depends on....
  - MrBra 11y ago
    Well that is a starting point. It would be even harder without it so better having it that not. Also do you have any alternatives? Maybe for a start, making a statically typed Sinatra rather than Rails would be a more affordable task. But anyway I'm not sure this is the right direction for Ruby as I think that more radical and different changes are needed to extract the full potential out of it. Anyway if Infrared proves to be a nice and quick alternative solution that will let us gain back some lost terrain in those situations where Ruby was discarded because of performance, then I more then welcome it, hoping that a some point the efforts put in it will somehow also be useful to Ruby MRI (or whatever the Ruby reference implementation will be at that time) improvement..
    - vidarh 11y ago
      > Also do you have any alternatives? Yes: Not doing it. > in those situations where Ruby was discarded because of performance In most cases where Ruby gets discarded because of performance, it's a red herring. Most of Ruby's main uses are in areas where you can generally make things IO bound fairly easily. For my part, I don't believe Ruby needs static typing to get far more performant. I'm working on a Ruby compiler, and while it's far from usable, from looking at MRI in particular it's worth noting that MRI implements pretty much nothing of the last 30 years or so of dynamic language optimizations. Look towards JRuby today, and especially the Truffle backend, for indications of where Ruby optimizations can be going without sacrificing what makes the language attractive in the process. That's not to say there aren't warts that makes it harder than necessary, but you can get very far with far less impact on the language than taking away dynamic typing.
      - MrBra 11y ago
        Wow, then you do have an alternative! Hope to hear something more about it soon!
- fleitz 11y ago
  Rails is competitive... It trades execution performance for developer performance. If you prefer faster execution and slower dev then another framework might be more appropriate.
- slackstation 11y ago
  Elixir(elixir-lang.org) and Phoenix(www.phoenixframework.org) seems to be coming along nicely. High speed and concurrency by building on the Erlang VM. Written by Rails Core developers who wanted more speed but, the spirit of Rails (though it's not a 1-to-1 port in the least)
overload119 11y ago
Cached version, as the site is having trouble loading for me. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7UYpJjGdULsJ:infraruby.com/blog/infraruby-3-7-released+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7UYpJjG...
vidarh 11y ago
"Statically-typed Ruby" that isn't actually Ruby, but a subset of Ruby[1] + mandatory type annotations. A rather misleading title. E.g. here's an example [2], with stuff like this: ## java.lang.String -> void def set_title(title) @title_view.setText(title) return end I kinda doubt this will take off with most Ruby users. Though being able to use something quite close to Ruby to write native Android apps is somewhat appealing even with extra pain (RubyMotion seems nicer to me, but the compiler only runs on OS X). [1] "The runtime implements selected methods from core classes" [long list omitted] [2] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sUdn7y_lf8gJ:infraruby.com/examples/wiktionary+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sUdn7y_...
- infraruby 11y ago
  > "Statically-typed Ruby" that isn't actually Ruby Yes, "statically-typed Ruby" != "Ruby". > but a subset of Ruby Necessarily (because "statically-typed"). You can see the supported methods here: http://infraruby.com/reference http://infraruby.com/reference
- duaneb 11y ago
  RubyMotion is terrible: it's expensive, closed, and is basically objective-c meets ruby syntax. This is at least running on a JVM, which gives you a buttload of tooling.
  - fleitz 11y ago
    That's what I love most about the JVM, lots of tools to solve problems that don't exist on other platforms.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      If we remove the snark and keep the reality: Those problems do exist on all platforms and the tooling elsewhere is usually not as good.
      - 11y ago
fuzzythinker 11y ago
How does this compare to Crystal[1]? Crystal is very clear that it compiles to native [2]. Tried to figure out what InfraRuby compiles to, but no avail. Is it to JVM? [1] http://crystal-lang.org http://crystal-lang.org [2] Very impressive result actually. It only performs ~3x slower on a basic Monte Carlo Tree Search compared to Nim, which itself is ~c speed.
- infraruby 11y ago
  > How does this compare to Crystal? You can use InfraRuby code with a Ruby interpreter: http://infraruby.com/blog/why-infraruby http://infraruby.com/blog/why-infraruby > Tried to figure out what InfraRuby compiles to, but no avail. Sorry, that should be made clearer... > Is it to JVM? Yes! ruby.Object extends java.lang.Object: http://infraruby.com/reference/Object http://infraruby.com/reference/Object
stripeless 11y ago
Heh good luck get any of the Ruby "code" that community cares about like Rails to run on this - it is 99% magic, and DHH likes magik too much to want typing...
- fleitz 11y ago
  It's more like context... Rails has a lot of context which allows developers to rapidly specify what they want to happen in the context of web apps. Rails is like asking someone to get milk, rails maps a route, obeys the laws of the road while getting there, pays for it, and returns with milk. In other frameworks you explicitly have to tell it every little detail of how to get milk, usually culminating in the IMammalianFactoryMilkFactory pattern.
Demagog 11y ago
If you want Ruby-like syntax with static typing and almost no type annotation then Crystal is good for you. Sadly no windows binary available

70 points by MrBra 11y ago

ankurpatel 11y ago

Finally a solution that can makes Rails more competitive

pjonesdotca 11y ago
Wait what? To whom?
vidarh 11y ago
If you can find anyone willing to port Rails to a statically typed subset that requires adding type annotations and also porting every single gem it depends on....
- MrBra 11y ago
  Well that is a starting point. It would be even harder without it so better having it that not. Also do you have any alternatives? Maybe for a start, making a statically typed Sinatra rather than Rails would be a more affordable task. But anyway I'm not sure this is the right direction for Ruby as I think that more radical and different changes are needed to extract the full potential out of it. Anyway if Infrared proves to be a nice and quick alternative solution that will let us gain back some lost terrain in those situations where Ruby was discarded because of performance, then I more then welcome it, hoping that a some point the efforts put in it will somehow also be useful to Ruby MRI (or whatever the Ruby reference implementation will be at that time) improvement..
  - vidarh 11y ago
    > Also do you have any alternatives? Yes: Not doing it. > in those situations where Ruby was discarded because of performance In most cases where Ruby gets discarded because of performance, it's a red herring. Most of Ruby's main uses are in areas where you can generally make things IO bound fairly easily. For my part, I don't believe Ruby needs static typing to get far more performant. I'm working on a Ruby compiler, and while it's far from usable, from looking at MRI in particular it's worth noting that MRI implements pretty much nothing of the last 30 years or so of dynamic language optimizations. Look towards JRuby today, and especially the Truffle backend, for indications of where Ruby optimizations can be going without sacrificing what makes the language attractive in the process. That's not to say there aren't warts that makes it harder than necessary, but you can get very far with far less impact on the language than taking away dynamic typing.
    - MrBra 11y ago
      Wow, then you do have an alternative! Hope to hear something more about it soon!
fleitz 11y ago
Rails is competitive... It trades execution performance for developer performance. If you prefer faster execution and slower dev then another framework might be more appropriate.
slackstation 11y ago
Elixir(elixir-lang.org) and Phoenix(www.phoenixframework.org) seems to be coming along nicely. High speed and concurrency by building on the Erlang VM. Written by Rails Core developers who wanted more speed but, the spirit of Rails (though it's not a 1-to-1 port in the least)

overload119 11y ago

Cached version, as the site is having trouble loading for me. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7UYpJjGdULsJ:infraruby.com/blog/infraruby-3-7-released+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7UYpJjG...

vidarh 11y ago

"Statically-typed Ruby" that isn't actually Ruby, but a subset of Ruby[1] + mandatory type annotations. A rather misleading title. E.g. here's an example [2], with stuff like this: ## java.lang.String -> void def set_title(title) @title_view.setText(title) return end I kinda doubt this will take off with most Ruby users. Though being able to use something quite close to Ruby to write native Android apps is somewhat appealing even with extra pain (RubyMotion seems nicer to me, but the compiler only runs on OS X). [1] "The runtime implements selected methods from core classes" [long list omitted] [2] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sUdn7y_lf8gJ:infraruby.com/examples/wiktionary+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sUdn7y_...

infraruby 11y ago
> "Statically-typed Ruby" that isn't actually Ruby Yes, "statically-typed Ruby" != "Ruby". > but a subset of Ruby Necessarily (because "statically-typed"). You can see the supported methods here: http://infraruby.com/reference http://infraruby.com/reference
duaneb 11y ago
RubyMotion is terrible: it's expensive, closed, and is basically objective-c meets ruby syntax. This is at least running on a JVM, which gives you a buttload of tooling.
- fleitz 11y ago
  That's what I love most about the JVM, lots of tools to solve problems that don't exist on other platforms.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    If we remove the snark and keep the reality: Those problems do exist on all platforms and the tooling elsewhere is usually not as good.
    - 11y ago

fuzzythinker 11y ago

How does this compare to Crystal[1]? Crystal is very clear that it compiles to native [2]. Tried to figure out what InfraRuby compiles to, but no avail. Is it to JVM? [1] http://crystal-lang.org http://crystal-lang.org [2] Very impressive result actually. It only performs ~3x slower on a basic Monte Carlo Tree Search compared to Nim, which itself is ~c speed.

infraruby 11y ago
> How does this compare to Crystal? You can use InfraRuby code with a Ruby interpreter: http://infraruby.com/blog/why-infraruby http://infraruby.com/blog/why-infraruby > Tried to figure out what InfraRuby compiles to, but no avail. Sorry, that should be made clearer... > Is it to JVM? Yes! ruby.Object extends java.lang.Object: http://infraruby.com/reference/Object http://infraruby.com/reference/Object

stripeless 11y ago

Heh good luck get any of the Ruby "code" that community cares about like Rails to run on this - it is 99% magic, and DHH likes magik too much to want typing...

fleitz 11y ago
It's more like context... Rails has a lot of context which allows developers to rapidly specify what they want to happen in the context of web apps. Rails is like asking someone to get milk, rails maps a route, obeys the laws of the road while getting there, pays for it, and returns with milk. In other frameworks you explicitly have to tell it every little detail of how to get milk, usually culminating in the IMammalianFactoryMilkFactory pattern.

Demagog 11y ago

If you want Ruby-like syntax with static typing and almost no type annotation then Crystal is good for you. Sadly no windows binary available