
High Performance Ruby in RPython - renlinx
http://docs.topazruby.com/en/latest/
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marktangotango
For anyone interested in learning more about RPython, Laurence Tratt has an
indepth blog post here:

[http://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/fast_enough_vms_in_fast...](http://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/fast_enough_vms_in_fast_enough_time)

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mathgeek
First bullet point on the list of known issues:

* Most of the standard library is missing.

I don't think "high performance ruby" is very useful without the standard
library, personally.

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bdcravens
This was announced on HN 2 years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177034](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177034)

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overgard
I can't remember where I saw it (pypy dev list maybe?) but unfortunately I
think the project has been mostly abandoned. Wouldn't hurt for someone to fork
it though, it seems like a great idea if someone had the time to move it
forward.

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chrisseaton
This is a great project but unfortunately it seems to be dead - no commits
since August last year
[https://github.com/topazproject/topaz](https://github.com/topazproject/topaz).

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cookiecaper
That's only 6 months. I don't know if I'd call an obvious research project
like this "dead" after that time period. I think there's a difference between
"dead" and "not exceptionally active". And I don't think that not being
exceptionally active necessarily means anything for the quality of the
software; people continue actively use a lot of software that hasn't seen a
single patch in years.

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ksec
I think Topaz was more of an experiment, For high performance Ruby
implementation there are only two left, JRuby + Truffle and RuJIT

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moe
Is anyone running JRuby in production for anything?

Every time I tried it out so far it turned out _slower_ than MRI for me.
Perhaps I was always hitting on pathological cases, though (tight data
processing loops).

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pselbert
Don't have a citation for this, but I recall hearing that Square runs JRuby in
production.

Separately, the start time makes JRuby awful for TDD/Dev, but once it has time
to warm up in production it is vastly faster. Scan back through some Ruby
Rogues episodes, they discuss it a few times in more detail.

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rubyfan
Benchmarks?

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chrisseaton
I benchmark Topaz alongside the implementation I work on, JRuby+Truffle,
[http://www.chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/deoptimizing/benchmar...](http://www.chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/deoptimizing/benchmarks/).

To see Topaz at its best, scroll down to Benchmarks and click Synthetic.

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espadrine
Did you do a FOSDEM talk? Looks like it. Great talk, and great work.

Truffle is great, but strangely its documentation is spread all over the Web,
one piece on java.net, another on github/jruby's wiki, yet another on uni-
linz.ac.at... How does the team work?

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chrisseaton
JRuby+Truffle is funded by Oracle Labs. There's two full-time employees on it,
a PhD student at Linz, and many other people who contribute occasionally or
work on libraries we use. Yeah, two of us were at FOSEM. We all work remotely
around the world.

The documentation is a bit all over the place at the moment, reflecting the
different aspects of the project - part academic/industrial research
collaboration, part open source product development. We're not trying to get
anyone to use it yet, which is why there isn't a single coherent flashy
landing page, but we'll get to that in time.

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rubyfan
How far off do you think that might be? The benchmarks are appealing and the
optimizations seem like a no brainer (I know easier said than done). What
holds this back from being production ready, more Rspec?

Off topic now but Truffle looks slightly more interesting than Topaz.

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chrisseaton
We have to implement the rest of the core library, and we have to implement a
lot of the standard library as well. That's a huge task with thousands of
methods, but we're using the code from Rubinius for a lot of it and making
good progress, so we hope to be able to run some of the simpler web frameworks
by RubyConf this year. It may be another year beyond that before I recommend
anyone uses it, or it may be sooner.

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rubyfan
How can folks help this effort out if so inclined?

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chrisseaton
Join us on #jruby on IRC

