

Twitter Engineering Blog: Faster Ruby (Kiji Update) - chanks
http://engineering.twitter.com/2011/05/faster-ruby-kiji-update.html

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tomfakes
This doesn't add up for me. Unless they've been working on this for a long
time - at least a year, why did they pick the very slowest current version of
Ruby to start this process with?

Ruby 1.9 gives you an easy doubling of performance from base Ruby 1.8. Ruby
Enterprise Edition is a worthy upgrade to the 1.8 codebase, but 1.9 is where
the action should be. I haven't used 1.8 for over year, 1.9 is that good.

For some reason they mention maybe trying Ruby 1.9 and JRuby at some future
time.

If you care about performance, and you want to play with heap implementations,
then the JVM has you covered. JRuby is the version I would have _started_ with
just to play with GC settings.

I'm all for playing with stuff to find things out, but this feels like they
aren't spending their time wisely to get the result that they need.

~~~
cmer
1.9 doesn't always result in speed improvements. We benchmarked some of our
code against REE and 1.9.2 and the difference was negligible, if at all.

I agree with you however. 1.9 is the future and that's where they should be
spending their time. Let 1.8 die already...

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kristianp
Ruby needs a modern garbage collector, so I guess this is a step in the right
direction.

