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by Glenn Vanderburg.
Original Post: MagLev
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Like Chad, I think MagLev’s initial performance numbers will hold up.
It’s possible that as it matures it will get slower, but it could get
a lot slower than it is now and still easily be the fastest Ruby
VM around.
And I agree with Chad that it might even get faster. I’ve also spent
some time investigating how to make Ruby run on a Smalltalk VM, and
it’s a really close fit. During the presentation at RailsConf, either
Avi or the Gemstone guys revealed that they had modified their Smalltalk VM
by adding two new bytecodes aimed at Ruby. I’ll go so far as to
speculate: it’s likely that those two bytecodes deal with variadic
methods and creation/lookup of dynamic instance variables. It sounds as
though the core Ruby language is nearly complete on top of that base, so
it’s easy to imagine that the early, hurried implementation of those
two new bytecodes could be optimized further. And some of the Ruby features
that have hurt JRuby’s performance will be no problem on a Smalltalk
VM—ObjectSpace, for example, can work using the same facilities that
Smalltalk’s development tools use today.
The persistence story is amazing. Avi and the team at Gemstone plan to
implement an interface that is similar to ActiveRecord, but cleaner, since
the object/relational impedance mismatch no longer applies.
Finally, there’s the question of licensing. I’ll be shocked if
MagLev is open-source, but I think there’s room for a proprietary
Ruby implementation. The team has committed to complying with RubySpec,
which means I’m not very worried about compatibility. Most Ruby
projects won’t need MagLev, but the ones that do will gladly pay for
a top-notch, supercharged implementation with great scalability and
persistence stories.
I’m definitely looking forward to hearing more about MagLev over the
next few months.
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