From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2005-04-08T11:14:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Seven new VMs, all in a row

In article <1112914652.066124.91370@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
Avi Bryant <avi.bryant@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>Peter Suk wrote:
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> I thought I'd talk about my new project here, since there is a good
>> chance that someone might be interested in it.  I'm planning to put
>> Ruby on top of Smalltalk VMs.
>
>Hi Peter,
>
>I'm definitely interested in this; please keep me posted.  Actually, a
>couple of people are aware that I was looking into the possibility of
>doing this as a commercial product - since, from my benchmarking, we
>can get about a 20x to 30x speed increase by hosting Ruby on a
>commercial Smalltalk VM like VisualWorks, it seemed like it might be

This "20x to 30x speed increase" stuff is interesting.  I would have 
thought it would be closer to something like 5x.  Can anyone elaborate on 
how those increases are being acheived in the SmallTalk VMs?  I'm wondering 
if it might also be worthwhile to incorporate some of these ideas into YARV - 
parhaps that would get us to high-speed Ruby even faster than trying to 
put Ruby on top of a SmallTalk VM?

Phil