Ruby on Rails Planet

How Phusion Built A More Efficient Ruby 1.8 Interpreter »

Created at: 16.12.2009 11:58, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Cool

Phusion Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition developers Ninh "Hernandez" Bui and Hongli Lai travelled to San Francisco last week and gave a 35 minute Google Tech Talk called Building A More Efficient Ruby Interpreter.

The talk focused on how the guys (with some help from other sources, including Joe Damato and Aman Gupta) have dug into MRI Ruby 1.8's internals to get some significant memory usage and thread performance improvements for their Ruby Enterprise Edition branch (they're not calling it a fork) of Ruby 1.8.

The video is presented in HD so the slides are easy to see and the audio is solid. If taking a small trip through Ruby's garbage collection, memory allocation, and threading system sounds good to you (or you just want to know what Ruby Enterprise Edition is all about), it's a must watch. If you want some practical Ruby stuff and don't care about what the interpreter's doing, give it a miss.

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Amp: A Revolution in Source Version Control (in Ruby!) »

Created at: 27.11.2009 16:03, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Cool Tools

Amp is a new Ruby based project that aims to "change the way we approach VCS" (version control systems). Currently it's basically a port of the Mercurial version control system - a common alternative to the Git system that's more popular in Rubyland - but it aims to abstract things to the point where it could be used in place of Git, Bazaar, SVN, CVS, Darcs, and so forth.

The creators of Amp believe that while there are lots of great repository formats out there, none of the official clients are "truly good software" and so they're aiming to build something that abstracts away all of the pain into a heavily customizable Ruby library and client. Even now you can add your own commands to Amp or adjust those that already exist, meaning you can totally customize a powerful source control tool to your own taste.

One of the points that's constantly stressed on Amp's rather well designed official site is that the project is actively looking for new contributors and help. They have a repo on GitHub if you want to fork and issue pull requests, as well as an IRC channel on Freenode, #amp.

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MagLev Alpha Released: A New, Scalable Ruby Implementation »

Created at: 21.11.2009 04:20, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Cool Linux Specific News OS X Specific Tools

MagLev is a new(ish) Ruby implementation built by Gemstone Systems that focuses on providing an integrated object persistence layer and a distributed shared cache - a truly scalable Ruby implementation. Maglev has, however, had an air of vaporware about it, having been hyped up in early 2008 and only available to a small group of alpha testers till now. That changes today with the first public, alpha release!

Back in early 2008, MagLev program manager Bob Walker did an interview with InfoQ about the project where he said that 8 people were working on MagLev, so this is a pretty big deal for them. Developer Avi Bryant then did a short presentation at RailsConf 2008 where he gave a comprehensive overview of what MagLev is along with some live demonstrations.

Why Should You Care?

In short, MagLev is cool for a few reasons. Two key ones being that 1) MagLev runs on the SmallTalk virtual machine which, it is claimed, should yield significant performance increases for a language like Ruby, and 2) a MagLev environment allows multiple Ruby processes over multiple machines (if you wish) to use the same objects simultaneously for easy scalability. Avi's video is great if you want to get a grasp on it:

MagLev presentation at RailsConf 2008 from Monty Williams on Vimeo.

Developer Monty Williams is keen to stress that this is an alpha, not a beta, so you can't expect it to run Rails or any gems that require C extensions. That said, it does run Sinatra, Rack, and RubyGems, plus a significant effort has been put into passing the RubySpec, so it's not as if it's a crippled implementation as such.

If you want to learn more, consider following the MagLev team on Twitter @MagLev and checking out the official mailing list "maglev-discussion."

Installation (i.e. getting to an irb prompt that works)

Bear in mind that MagLev will only work on 64 bit versions of OS X, Linux, and Solaris, so if you're in the 32 bit club, there's no point in going any further (yet).

If you download the MagLev Installer script (small ZIP file), you can run the installMaglev.sh script and install the latest version like so:

./installMaglev.sh 22578

The announcement post doesn't make it clear you need to provide a version number of what version number to provide. 22578 was mentioned earlier in the day though, and it seems to work.

Once installed, MagLev provides some info about environment variables you need to add to your .bashrc or .bash_profile. Follow these, then open a new terminal and here's how you get to an irb session:

$ maglev start
startnetldi[Info]: Starting GemStone network server "gs64ldi".
startnetldi[Error]:  could not start server
startstone[Info]: Starting Stone repository monitor "maglev".
startstone[Info]: GemStone server 'maglev' has been started.

$ maglev-irb
irb(main):001:0> 20 + 20
=> 40
irb(main):002:0> exit
error , SystemExit Error,  nil,
          during /Users/peter/Downloads/MagLev-installer/MagLev-22578.MacOSX/bin/maglev-irb
SystemExit Error,  nil

Alternatively: GitHub installation

MagLev is also available from GitHub to clone. To install MagLev from GitHub:

git clone git://github.com/MagLev/maglev.git
cd maglev
./install.sh

.. then follow the note about adding the path to your .bashrc or .bash_profile and running Rake in a new prompt (though still under the maglev project directory).

If you get any further with doing something interesting like, say, getting an IRB prompt up successfully on this, do post a comment ;-)

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MacRuby 0.5 Beta 2: AOT Compilation, Rack & Sinatra Support, And More »

Created at: 18.11.2009 17:00, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Cool News OS X Specific

MacRuby, a port of Ruby 1.9 to the Mac OS X Objective C common runtime, is today one step closer to a production-ready Ruby implementation with the release of beta 2 of MacRuby 0.5. MacRuby 0.5 has been highly anticipated since it was first mentioned back in March because it promises significant performance improvements, a new LLVM based virtual machine (replacing YARV), and significant compatibility improvements and bug fixes. Even still at this beta stage, 0.5 delivers on these promises.

New in MacRuby 0.5 so far:

rdoc and ri now work - thanks to compatibility bug fixes
Rack and Sinatra support
Experimental support for BigDecimal, OpenSSL, and JSON extensions
Compiler with support for building fat binaries (i.e. universal binaries)
An all new LLVM based VM
A gazillion bug fixes and performance improvements - as always!

At this stage, the MacRuby team want people to download MacRuby, give it a test, and report any bugs or issues encountered. If you're on OS X, don't be worried about installing it. It comes in a simple installer package and presents itself through the macruby and macirb binaries, so it doesn't clash with any existing Ruby implementations installed on your machine.

For me, perhaps the most exciting developments are the macrubyc compiler and macruby_deploy utility. In a basic benchmark I performed, compiling a Ruby script that does a Fannkuch benchmark yielded a 20% speed increase with MacRuby 0.5b2. Impressive, as the baseline interpreted version was on par with MRI 1.9.1 already! The macruby_deploy utility is a new addition to help you deploy your MacRuby applications as regular OS X apps. It puts the MacRuby framework along with your script's executable into an application bundle ready to be deployed to any other Mac - even those without MacRuby.

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