

Rubinius 1.2.0 released (it's an implementation of Ruby) - indy
http://rubini.us/releases/1.2.0/

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timmorgan
Can someone give me a short synopsis of why one might want to use Rubinius
over YARV?

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evanphx
Rubinius can run pure ruby code much faster than YARV because of things like a
better GC and the ability to compile ruby code down to machine code (a JIT
compiler).

Rubinius is much easier to work and understand than YARV because much of the
core functionality is written in Ruby itself. This lends itself to being
easier to hack on and add features to.

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kkowalczyk
But is it actually faster?

Rubinius homepage claims that it's fast but has no benchmark results that I
could find, which makes it hard to take those claims seriously.

I like the way JavaScript engines are being compared using two or three
standard benchmarks.

(to pre-empt "benchmarks are useless" comments: yes, benchmarks are flawed
because they only measure what they measure, but a decent benchmark is better
than no benchmark).

~~~
technomancy
> But is it actually faster?

It's much faster at executing pure-ruby code. Since it has a much smaller
portion implemented in C, total execution time may or may not be slower than
YARV; it depends on the execution profile of the task at hand. Code that
spends most of its time in things that YARV does in C will be slower on
Rubinius.

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railsjedi
Any word on 1.9 syntax support? Sorry, I havent been keeping up on Rubinius
progress recently. I've switched all my projects to 1.9 syntax though so going
back to 1.8 would be kind of a drag.

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evanphx
1.9 is next big feature being worked on. The multiverse branch has the start
of it, and speed is going to pick up on it in the new year.

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mark_l_watson
I switched to Rubinius earlier this year for day-to-day development. Good
project and deserves to be supported. One issue for me however that is also
the case for JRuby is that much more memory is usually used than with Ruby
1.9.2. If you need several Ruby processes running on a low end server to
support a web app then memory footprint size is important.

All that said, I love the idea of Rubinius and it is an important project.

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kingkilr
Congrats Evan, great work.

