The Great Ruby Shootout (July 2010)

The Great Ruby Shootout measures the performance of several Ruby implementations by testing them against a series of synthetic benchmarks. Recently I ran Mac and Windows shootouts as well, which tested a handful of implementations. However this article reports on the results of extensive benchmark testing of eight different Ruby implementations on Linux. The setup For this shootout I included a subset of the Ruby...

The Great Ruby Shootout (Windows Edition)

This post contains the results of a Ruby shootout on Windows that I recently conducted. You can find the Mac edition, published last month, here. I was planning to have this one ready much sooner, but a couple of serious events in personal life prevented that from happening. Be sure to grab my feed or join the newsletter to avoid missing the upcoming Linux shootout. The setup For this shootout I included a subset of...

Benchmarking MacRuby 0.6

Recently MacRuby 0.6 was released. The development team put a lot of emphasis on improving compatibility with Ruby 1.9, and the viability of MacRuby as a tool for developing Mac OS X applications. Focus on these aspects took precedence over performance, but I was still curious to see how well it performed when compared to Ruby 1.8.7 and Ruby 1.9, respectively. This article showcases the results of a small Ruby...

How much faster is Ruby on Linux?

In a previous article I compared the performance of Ruby on Windows, built through Microsoft Visual C++ and GCC. The numbers for the MinGW version were very impressive. So the question now becomes, how does its performance compare to that of Ruby on Linux? To quote one person (Alex) who commented on the aforementioned post: With the new mingw32 substantial speed improvements, think it makes sense now to also test...

A faster Ruby on Windows is possible (benchmarks for 4 implementations inside)

In yesterday’s post I compared IronRuby 0.9, Ruby 1.8.6 (from the One-Click Installer) and Ruby 1.9.1 (downloaded from the official site) against one another. IronRuby did great, but the discussion in the comment section quickly veered towards what version of the One-Click Ruby Installer should have been used. I justified my choice of using the “old” One-Click Installer, by the fact that I...

Comparing the performance of IronRuby, Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9 on Windows

In my latest article I discussed the importance of JRuby as a means of introducing Ruby to the Enterprise world. Most of the companies that belong to this ecosystem are Java based, but we cannot forget that a sizable portion of them are Microsoft-centric. Within these companies, Ruby will be far more welcome if a .NET implementation is available. The answer to this need is sufficiently fulfilled by IronRuby (version...

Reflections on the Ruby shootout

Yesterday I published The Great Ruby Shootout and it quickly gathered a fair deal of attention. It was on the front page of Slashdot, Hacker News, Reddit, and so on. More than 15,000 people came by to read about the results of my comparison between Ruby implementations. Those numbers looked good but something didn’t add up. Ever since I clicked the “Publish” button, I had a very uneasy feeling...

The Great Ruby Shootout (December 2008)

The long awaited Ruby virtual machine shootout is here. In this report I’ve compared the performances of several Ruby implementations against a set of synthetic benchmarks. The implementations that I tested were Ruby 1.8 (aka MRI), Ruby 1.9 (aka Yarv), Ruby Enterprise Edition (aka REE), JRuby 1.1.6RC1, Rubinius, MagLev, MacRuby 0.3 and IronRuby. Disclaimer Just as with the previous shootout, before...

Merb, Rails Myths, Language Popularity and other Zenbits

Zenbits are posts which include a variety of interesting subjects that I’d like to talk about briefly, without writing a post for each of them. Merb: A few days ago Merb 1.0 was released. Congratulations to Ezra Zygmuntowicz on this important milestone, the Merb community and Engine Yard (who finances the project). Merb 1.0 wasn’t even out yet when some people had already started commenting on the...

A status update

More than a month has passed since my last update. Did you miss me? I sure missed you, I truly love you guys. Jokes aside, it was rather uncharacteristic for this blog to go so long without a post, so I feel that a status update is in order before my feed ends up in the Dinosaur reports of your RSS reader. And with humanity facing the imminent threat of the Large Hadron Collider, I didn’t want to be sucked...

Ruby Shootout Status Update

I want to provide those who are waiting for the Ruby shootout with a heads up. The benchmark suite needs some substantial changes in order to ensure accuracy and fairness for all the VMs involved. This will delay the execution (and reporting) of the shootout further, but it will be worth it. I definitely prefer a shootout that’s published later in July (or heck even August) that is realistic, fair and provides...

This Week in Ruby (June 26, 2008)

This is the 11th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. This edition begins with some bad news: Several vulnerabilities that affect the main Ruby implementation have been discovered. There is no reason to freak out, but they are serious. An ill-intended person could take advantage of these vulnerability and execute arbitrary code. Matasano has...

Heads up regarding the shootout

Call it Murphy’s law if you will, but over the weekend my MacBook Pro’s charger cord developed a nasty rip (see photo). I tried electrical tape and other (potentially) “unsafe” measures, but to no avail. My laptop has no charge and is essentially dead. I’ve ordered a new MagSafe power adapter and it should be here in a few days (I hope). This means that the shootout testing that was...

This Week in Ruby (June 16, 2008)

This is the 10th episode of This Week in Ruby, please consider subscribing to my feed so as to not miss any weekly installments. As announced a few days ago, This Week in Ruby is being split into two parts: This Week in Ruby and This Week in Rails. The one you are reading is the Ruby edition, while Riding Rails – the official Rails blog – will host the Rails one. Links to and from each post will be...

MagLev handles trees like a monkey

Over the past couple of nights, I tried out MagLev on my Mac laptop (Mac OS X Leopard, 2.2GHz, 2GB Ram). While the shootout will provide us with a detailed comparison between MagLev and the other major Ruby implementations (on many tests) I thought I’d share my first impressions. MagLev is going to be a fast implementation of Ruby. How many times faster? Well, it depends on the test, and I don’t have...

Let’s create a Ruby Benchmark Suite

My previous post about MagLev and the planning of the next Ruby shootout received a lot of attention. MagLev’s speed claims have been subject to a lot of skepticism, and many believe that these impressive figures are due to a combination of clever optimization for trivial tests and incompleteness. The skepticism is understandable. There have been very bright people working on alternative VMs for years, and...