reddit

“RubyConf '08 featured many talks about the various Ruby VMs. The talks varied from in-depth technical coverage of implementation details, to tech demos and general talks about Ruby performance.



Koichi Sasada's talk "Future of Ruby VM", where he explains his view of the C implementation of Ruby as the pragmatic solution for the near future, despite some of it's problems such as the conservative GC.

He continues to discuss some optimizations which were implemented for 1.9, which are off for now, but should be enabled in 1.9.2. Examples of these optimizations are tail call optimization, stack caching, efficient method caching and a more efficient Fiber implementation.

At around 20:00, he mentions some of of his research interests. One of them is Ricsin, which allows to embed C source inside Ruby code. The sample source from the presentation slides should make the concept clear:” source...