Hacker News Reader

Comment by skeptic2718 | Hacker News Reader

I expected CPython to have something like this, especially in 3.x but nothing.

If Ruby can get faster than Python sooner, I'd switch focus to Ruby (and somewhat make Go less of a priority for us).

Don't count on Ruby getting 10x faster anytime soon. The meta-object model and method-missing reliance of many of the libraries make performance optimizations of JITs a very limited enterprise.

I hear the Truffle+Graal combination is getting very good results about Ruby. Here is video about it (pointed to the missing-method example): [1]

They're hitting 35x in some benchmarks [2]. Most benefits being in workloads where Ruby has to continuously talk to C; the result-passing part gets compiled away.

It is available in Java 9, if I'm not mistaken. LLVM IR bytecode ingestion is in preparations too [3].

[1] https://youtu.be/b1NTaVQPt1E?t=48m17s [2] http://jruby.org/bench9000/ [3] https://github.com/graalvm/sulong

Three of the biggest Rails Shop, ( this is assuming the most popular, resources heavy usage are Rails related. ) all run on CRuby. That is Cookpad, Shopify, and GitHub. ( Basecamp in rather small compared to these 3 )

I wonder if there are any popular webshop ran on JRuby, or why those three dont use JRuby.

And when you take those two things away, you pretty much just have Java. Which, while it can be optimized, it's also Java.

There are other ways of meta programming that are still performant.... that is why many Ruby devs see Elixir/beam and Clojure/jvm as good language/platform alternatives.

Some of us do like Java, even if it is lacking in some things.

Java with Ruby's syntax and undeclared typing would make Java programs so shorter that it would be worth it. But there would be nothing left of Java, except the object orientation. It would just be a simpler more static Ruby.

You might want to look into Kotlin.

No because it's statically typed, too much work programming like that and it's not worth it for the kind of software I develop (backend of web/mobile apps), but thanks. Suggestions are always appreciated.

I found a defunct Ruby like language called Reia a couple of days ago https://github.com/tarcieri/reia/ and http://reia-lang.org/

It's object oriented and runs on the top of the Erlang VM. It maps classes on gen servers, which is pretty natural and it spares the developer all the boilerplate of creating a gen server module. Unfortunately the language designer killed it because "it's pretty bad to have two competing niche languages with nearly identical features." The other language was Elixir. However the two languages are very different. Elixir is 100% functional, Reia could have been the language to transition millions of OO developers to a functional and concurrent world. I could have used it instead of Ruby.

This is an odd stance. Backends are where static typing shine, and where those who like static typing sing its praises. Maybe you just don't like static typing?

I really don't find static typing to be more "work". You still have to think about types in dynamically typed languages, you just get to skip specifying them.

Skipping that saves a lot of keypresses and time. I always found very little help from static typing. I know what I'm doing if I type hash = {} in Ruby and there is no need to declare it as HashTable (what else could it possibly be?). About the types of the keys and values, they don't matter much in my experience. Maybe it's Ruby or it's Rails, but they tend to fall right into place without surprises.

In case you're not aware, many static languages have implicit typing nowadays. I still write Ruby most often, but for example in Go you could just write `something := "string"` and with that := operator it'll manage the type assignment for you. Lots of other static languages offer that now also. I'm not well versed on modern Java, but the type system in Go pretty much gets out of the way for the things I've done with it.

> I type hash = {} in Ruby and there is no need to declare it as HashTable (what else could it possibly be?)

In java you have options other than a HashMap, there is LinkedHashMap (which preserves insertion order) and TreeMap (which stays sorted according to a comparator). There are also extensions for things like Immutability. The checking can also guarantee that it will only have one type of object, or a common interface, or you could allow it to accept any kind of object.

So, yeah, there's quite a few things that an associative array could be, and there's reasons for all that, and i've used most of these on web backends.

So.. Crystal lang then :p

They've already stated that it'll be a few years before they'll get ruby 3X faster.

The 3x was compared to Ruby 2.0, on some slides they claim Ruby 2.4 is already 30 - 40% faster then 2.0, so effectively you will only get around 2x more speedup.

No. Tinyruby/Potion is about 20x faster. Doable, but too complicated for the current maintainers

It's true that many libraries would perform poorly because of a reliance on method_missing. But what can be made quite fast is code that either uses define_method instead, or uses define_method on the first failed call.

In fact, a tracing jit could even make the method_missing case fast by automatically specialising and optimizing missing coupled with a vtable/dispatch table.

My forever-in-progress ahead-of-time Ruby compiler uses vtable based dispatch for every method name that's seen in the program at least once, and that's usually most of them (unless people e.g. construct method names dynamically at runtime).

To handle method_missing, it creates thunks for each method name and fills the missing vtable slots with those, which is similar to what I suggest above - the next step of dynamically optimising method_missing for called symbols and replacing the vtable thunks would be a relatively minor step in a JIT.

I don't think anyone expects Ruby to get dramatically faster in the very short term, but there's lots of opportunity to make most Ruby code much faster in the medium term.

I think we'll also start seeing implementations that do things like JIT influence how people write Ruby, because a lot of things won't matter much for MRI performance but will be a huge deal for implementations that uses compilation techniques, so it's possible to get a lot more "compiler-friendly" Ruby while still writing clean Ruby that runs well on other implementations.

e.g. the above "define_method on method_missing" basically boils down to (pseudo code):

    def method_missing sym, *args 
        raise suitable exception if sym doesn't meet right criteria
        define_method(sym, args...) do 
           ... whatever ..
        end
        send(sym,*args)
    end

If it lets an implementation speed up its (ab)use of method_missing enough, you'll see people adopt stuff like that.

Optimising method-missing and the rest of the meta-object model in a JIT is now a solved problem - I solved it for my PhD http://chrisseaton.com/phd/

It is actually possible to completely remove the overhead of method-missing.

While your work is very impressive, and I'm a big fan of Graal and systems like it, I think it's a mistake to say that something is solved when there's a single research system that gets good performance. As another example, there have been systems with fast continuations for 40 years, but I still wouldn't call that solved. I've built a JIT that's very effective at optimizing contracts, but I don't think that's solved either.

Well the statement was that it was not possible to remove the overhead of method_missing (well they didn't actually say 'impossible' but that's how I read it, and I also took them to be referring to peak performance, because people usually are).

I solved the problem of showing that it is possible to do that. Before people thought it was impossible, and now they know it isn't.

I'm not claiming I solved other problems such as removing the overhead with low memory or removing it in corner cases.

Smalltalk has those same features (which is where Ruby got them from). Almost all of the high performance JIT technology we use these days was originally invented by Smalltalk VM hackers. They invented that stuff specifically to make that kind of code go fast.

It already is, kind of, it is called Crystal, but yeah it isn't the same thing.

If you don't mind starting from scratch and using a statically typed language, crystal is amazing. However, you will not get vary far porting any large ruby project to crystal without a rewrite from scratch.

One thing I do like is that porting code from ruby to crystal to javascript is actually somewhat possible. FTW.

But why not just use Opal for that?

What's wrong with PyPy?

Good Python 3.x support...

Developers who like Python syntax and want C performance should seriously consider Nim.

http://nim-lang.org

What's the library story for Nim? Sincere question; not trying to start a flame war.

http://nim-lang.org/docs/lib.html

However many of the libraries list under "third party" are either unmaintained or not really ready for production. The stuff in the standard library seems pretty good though (although I've not used Nim for serious production work)

It's like the bad parts of Java mixed with Python to get a little more perf

Except it's nothing like that, it's like an interpreter framework written in Python with a reference implementation that happens to be a Python interpreter. Write your interpreter in RPython, use the right decorators and boom you have a compiled interpreter with a free JIT (with speeds that beat C in some workloads, apparently).

Pretty cool. Pretty unlike Java I think.

> Pretty unlike Java I think.

Time to learn about Graal, which will be partially integrated into Java 9.

https://wiki.openjdk.java.net/display/Graal/Publications+and...

Or JikesRVM for that matter, http://www.jikesrvm.org/

Or just switch to LuaJIT.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com