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...

MagLev rocks and the planning of the next Ruby shootout

I’m not at RailsConf, which is being held in Portland, but it doesn’t take a great leap of faith for me to believe that the session on MagLev was the star of the conference. Avi’s demo created quite an echo and it’s currently the most discussed topic in the Ruby and Rails communities, despite the announcements of IronRuby on Rails and today’s release of Rails 2.1. I had no doubt that...