Ruby Implementation Shootout

An anonymous reader writes "Ruby has an ever growing number of alternative implementations, and many of these attempt to improve the suboptimal performance of the current mainstream interpreter. Antonio Cangiano has an interesting article in which he benchmarks a few of the most popular Ruby implementations, including Yarv (the heart of Ruby 2.0), JRuby, Ruby.NET, Rubinius and Cardinal (Ruby on Parrot). Numerical evidence is provided rather than shear opinions. The tests show that Yarv is the fastest implementation and that it offers a promising future when it comes to the speed of the next Ruby version."

Read the disclaimer...

This being /. I don't expect anybody to actually read the acticel, but before you begin your rant^H^H^H^H ... post about how these tests are useless etc. etc. please, at least read the article disclaimer:

Don't read too much into this and don't draw any final conclusions. Each of these exciting projects have their own reason for being, as well as different pros and cons, which are not considered in this post. They each have a different level of stability and completeness. Furthermore, some of them haven't been optimized for speed yet. Take this post for what it is: an interesting experiment;

Now fell free to begin your rant about it being a slow news day...

Cardinal interesting

Though not familiar with the project, I'm impressed that the project with by far the most errors (Cardinal), indicating I assume that the least work has been done on it, is still so close to YARV - only 2-4 times slower in a couple tests.

I can't tell if those fast tests are so trivial that they offer little chance of further speedup, or whether YARV, which has had speed as a goal, is not going to be so much faster than a Parrot-based implementation once it (Cardinal) gets into working on optimization.

Anyone interested in providing some information on where the YARV performance comes from and whether Cardinal is likely to approach it more closely and farther across the board in the tests?

cool

they need to post the specs of the computer they where using tho, i could post numbers, but i would be running it on a p1 150mhz!

A shear opinion...

A shear opinion is like, a comment about Britney's latest screwup.

Try "sheer".

Java not slow enough for you? Try Ruby!

Performance isn't everything, but then again, when you are 400 times slower than Java [debian.org]... performance starts to matter.

Any YARV experts

Can anyone comment on why the YARV implementation is so much faster than the standard implementation? I know for example the SUN VM was originally only intended as a reference VM and faster implementations were developed but not on the scale of the differences highlighted here.

Re:Any YARV experts

Short answer: various things, compilation to bytecode before execution (I thought it was the case in the current interpreter, but might have been mistaken), etc.

Slightly less short answer: if I'm not mistaken, YARV includes a JIT compiler, similar to what Psyco [sourceforge.net] does in the Python world. Psyco has been known to accelerate code execution up to 100x times, so I'd expect YARV to be even faster than this benchmark shows when it's stabilized.

Re:Any YARV experts

The standard 1.8.X Ruby interpreter is a single-pass interpreter, and YARV is a virtual machine implementation. You can expect big improvements when moving to a VM implementation from an interpeter. The reason Java has never had such big improvements is that it's always been based on a VM.

This rule isn't exactly hard and fast, as verying implementations of VMs and interpreters can have different performance characteristics. For example, while perl is still probably considered an interpreted language, it's quite fast due to the interpreter using many compiler tricks such as parse tree optimizations. The ruby interpreter however has been notoriously slow, which is why ruby people are so excited about it.

unicode?

What's up these days with ruby and unicode? Of these implementations, do some do it one way and some another?

Feature comparison?

I don't think anyone decides to use Ruby based on performance, really. I'd be a lot more interested to hear whether any new features (notably, proper Unicode strings and native threads) are included in any of these implementations -- I really can't use Ruby without at least the former. I would have thought the Java and .NET implementations would be able to do these without too much trouble -- I'm well aware of the difficulty of working around the issues in the original C implementation but they are all just that, implementation issues.

I'd also be interested in standardization -- currently IIRC Ruby is specified as 'whatever Matz's implementation is observed to do, that's Ruby'.

Good news on Yarv speed improvements

I would use Ruby more if the runtime performance were better. For speed and dynamic language niceness I use Franz Common Lisp for most of the work for my current customer (AI medical applicaion) and I still find myself using Java a lot for serverside deployment goodness :-)

I would have prefered Ruby, BTW, because it is easy to train people in Ruby development while Common Lisp is a harder learning curve.

Once Yarv is very stable (maybe it is already?), then I will use Ruby for a larger percent of my new projects.

Ruby's Windows support

This study backs up what everyone who has tried Ruby on Windows already knows... it stinks! I'm actually not surprised to see that some of their tests errored out completely on Windows, even with the Ruby 1.8.5 binary.

Granted, Ruby is mostly used with Rails right now, but you'd think that if the language proponents want the language to take off, Windows support would be taken more seriously. In the couple years since I first tried Ruby, it doesn't seem like it has improved much at all.

Why not use C

C and cgi.

Re:so... ruby?

Check out http://www.ruby-lang.org/ [ruby-lang.org]

Re:so... ruby?

Can they update the article to give a brief blurb on what ruby is? Or is it something that has become so commonplace in the past 2 weeks that i'm a doof for not knowing?

hmmm...Could it be the object-oriented programming language Ruby?
Ruby [wikipedia.org]

Re:so... ruby?

I was on the same boat until a couple of weeks ago ... anyway, Ruby is The Hottest Thing Since Sliced Bread (TM). It's a programming language that was created in Japan all the way back in 1995. However, it has only just recently garnered mainstream interest due to the emergence of a web application framework built on Ruby, which is called Ruby on Rails and is said to be an incredibly well-thought and efficient framework.

More on Ruby here [wikipedia.org].

And more on Ruby on Rails here [wikipedia.org].

I personally have an enormous interest in Ruby on Rails, as it seems to be a very neat way of writing web applications, but I'm also a bit daunted; it's a new language and a whole new framework with different ways of doing things, so it's been slow going learning it. I just wish I knew where to get some extensive sample code to peruse - that's how I learn best. All I've seen are some very basic applications which don't really teach you the real tricks and show how it all comes together.

Re:so... ruby?

Yes, Ruby is the current web development flavor of the month, however, don't get caught up in the hype. There are good number of MVC web development frameworks in other languages, including even Lisp and Smalltalk, but most notably Python. In my opinion it makes more sense to learn a Python framework for a number of reasons. Mainly because Python is used in considerably more non-web applications than Ruby, which makes your skills more portable (and you more employable). Ruby on Rails is also very monolythic, while two of the the three most popular Python frameworks, TurboGears [turbogears.org] and Pylons [pylonshq.com] are very modular (especially Pylons since it's built around the WSGI [wsgi.org] spec). Finally, Python compiles to bytecode whereas Ruby does not. Hence Python outperforms Ruby in almost every shootout [debian.org].

Further reading:
Of snakes and rubies; Or why I chose Python over Ruby [infogami.com]
TurboGears and Pylons (a technical comparison) [ianbicking.org]
From PHP to Python [rightbrainnetworks.com] (my blog)

Re:so... ruby?

Minor note, Ruby on Rails is the web development flavor of the month, not ruby. There are a lot of interesting things happening in plain ole ruby, plus there are other web frameworks than Ruby on Rails, such as Nitro, Camping, etc.

I find it amusing someone would say learn Python because it's used more. Python may be older, but it's still sitting in the programming language high chair right next to Ruby. People say the same thing about Python; "if you want a job learn Java, c#, c++"; and you know what they're right, if you want a job learn Java, period.

I like both Ruby and Python, and I think a programmer would do well to learn one or both. They aren't as popular yet, like Java or c#, but I think they will be. And if you understand the concepts in one, you'll understand the other. Like Gretzky said, "I skate where the puck is going to be, not where it is"; good advice.

I prefer Ruby, but that is just a preference.

Re:so... ruby?

from the summary:
Numerical evidence is provided rather than shear opinions.

      Do those opinions come from sheeple?

Strings as objects

Well, you can also do it in Java .....

String a = "Hello".toLowerCase().toUpperCase();

.... but I'm not sure it makes a huge difference in real software development. I do however like it as the safe test for an exact match without worrying about null ....

if ("FOO".equals(a)) { ....

Re:so... ruby?

If there is anything that doesn't have to be defined on /., it's Ruby.

Re:so... ruby?

Ruby is a dynamically typed, strongly typed, runtime-interpretted, very object-oriented programming language. It was created about the same time as Python (10+ years ago?), but is less well-known in the United States as it originated in Japan. It is the langauge that the Ruby on Rails [rubyonrails.com] web framework is based on. See the official Ruby website [ruby-lang.org] for more information.

Re:so... ruby?

Don't be such a pure functional twit. A little 'state'-ment at the top of the page about how Ruby is an OO scripting language/interpreter of the curly-brace variety hailing from Japan would be nice. You may find state offensive, but it can save time.

"Shear" opinions

from TFA:
Numerical evidence is provided rather than shear opinions.

Would that be what the author thinks about scissors? For the semi-literate that should be "sheer opinion," not "shear opinions."