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."

Cardinal interesting

[mattr]

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?

unicode?

[bcrowell]

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

Ruby and Unicode

[metamatic]

What's up is that there's massive disagreement on whether Ruby's standard strings and characters should become Unicode. There are quite a few people used to the old world where a string was interchangeable with a vector of 8 bit bytes, and they don't want to let go [archivesat.com]. To add to the problems, Unicode is controversial in Japan [jbrowse.com]. So, expect Unicode to continue to be painful and inconsistent in Ruby even after the next major release.

Re:Ruby's Windows support

[zallus]

make it a stable and solid development platform...

Whoever said that was their primary, or even secondary goal? I use ruby as a prototyping language before rewriting in C. I only use it because it's so easy to work with all the "features of the day" in it.

Re:so... ruby?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you mean something like in Python:

>>> "hello".lower()[::-1].capitalize()
'Olleh'

Strings as objects

[RallyDriver]

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)) { ....