TruffleRuby

The language Ruby is one of the most beautiful languages. A lot of things can be done, it has a good level of abstraction, it has chosen some very good defaults, has provided some great ideas that I have not discovered in any other language that I know well and provides a lot of flexibility. But I could no longer recommend it for projects that might require a good performance. I won’t go into the issue of static typing vs. dynamic here. Ruby is following the dynamic typing path and if you think that is a bad idea at all, then it will never become your favorite. But this is an issue with pros and cons. The big disadvantage of Ruby is that it is not very good in terms of performance. The single threaded performance is somewhat better in many reasonable languages like Java, Python, Scala, Clojure, C, C#, F# and some others .. And it gets worse when we want to use multiple cores, because Ruby does not run them simultaneously, but uses a global lock which ensures that only one thread at a time is running. Or in case of JRuby just crashes or yields wrong results in certain mulithreaded programs that we could write.

One approach is to go for immutability as a default, which allows quite painless multithreading. Scala and Clojure follow this route, for example. It is hard to write good code with this constraint or to make good use of very local mutability without leaking it outside, but under these conditions multiple threads are just working fine without deadlocks, crashes or falsified results. Another approach is to just copy structures and leave its own copy to each thread. There are ways to do a lot on this path, but the copying costs a lot of memory and performance and it is not always a gain.

Now Ruby heavily relies on mutable structures for strings and collections. It is not reasonable to go for a total paradigm change in this aspect. But there are some ways to get good and safe and fast operations on these collections and strings without breaking this. One idea is to work with chunks of collections or strings. For strings, the string that we are working with is described as a concatenation of such strings. Many operations can be made by just concatenating multiple strings together and possibly replacing one of them with a copy that can be made as needed. This is called Rope. A similar approach can be applied to collections. Then a smart locking mechanism is applied to the shorter string or collections when needed, but many operations can avoid locking or block much less of the structure.

Also the compiler can analyze the program and simplify it to a great extent, compile it to the JVM, which in conjunction with hot spot optimizations will make it run really fast. Now this TruffleRuby is much faster than other Rubies, by a factor of about 10. It uses GraalVM and it actually supports a lot of C-extensions for libraries through the feature of GraalVM that they can be eventually compiled to the JVM. It does not work if extensions rely on implementation details of the Ruby structures in C and it often does not work for C-extensions that go to low level OS functionality. The current version of TruffleRuby is not really ready to use in conjunction with Ruby on Rails, which is kind of a no go, because Ruby is usually used in conjunction with Rails. My impression is that it will be possible to use it with Rails in a year or two.

Hearing of this in a talk by Benoit Daloze in the local Rails user group in Zürich was a great and positive surprise. Ruby gets interesting again.

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