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Comment by spullara | Hacker News Reader

If Twitter's port to the JVM didn't result in 10x fewer servers with 10x lower latency vs an identical Ruby implementation we wouldn't have done it. Sadly not much progress has been made on the RubyVM though Twitter did try with improvements to GC and other changes. We even tried JRuby as part of the evaluation.

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> Sadly not much progress has been made on the RubyVM

Lots of progress has been made on CRuby. The official optcarrot benchmark (realistic-ish interpreter bound) is ~6x faster on Ruby 2.6 than Ruby 1.8.

CRuby performance running Rails improved almost as much. Zendesk got a 2-3x improvement from 1.8 to 1.9 and 1.9 to 2.6 doubles it again.

How does that compare to the same algorithms run on other languages these days?

Shopify is working on this! They have YJIT, led by maximecb

Wasn't there a time when jruby was faster than the standard ruby implementation? On one hand, that's absurd, but on the other, a lot of effort goes into Hotspot, and you'll get those benefits for free.

Not really, it can turn out good from the JVM stuff for specific cases here and there, but it's mostly interesting for not having a GVL, thus enabling full parallelism for threads.

Is TruffleRuby promising at all?

Enormously. The latest Railsbench results on TruffleRuby are ~3x CRuby.

Nice. 10 years later but glad that Ruby programmers might have an option that lets them program the way they want without having to choose a different language / platform for performance.

It is still no where near the level that Twitter would have stayed with Ruby though. Although I believe TruffleRuby being 3x faster than current CRuby is only the beginning. JVM got tons of improvement in the past 10 years as well it is uncanny.

Although Dr Chris Seaton mentioned it is not his goal to have Shopify Rails running on top of TurffleRuby. Not sure if he meant it was short term or long term. I think Dr Stefan Marr will be joining him soon, and Dr Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert is leading a team working on YJIT in Shopify. ( Did Shopify just hire all known Dr. working on Ruby performance )

Might as well grab Charles Nutter while they are at it.

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