From: Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@...>
Date: 2011-07-27T06:50:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby to C transpiler


On Jul 26, 2011, at 07:11 , Robert Klemme wrote:

> Hans Mackowiak wrote in post #1013101:
>> translating an ruby program into an c program is not as simple possible
>> because of ducktyping and dynamic stuff like including and extending
>> objects ans classes
> 
> Performance gains would probably be marginal - unless all the dynamic 
> features were omitted.

For type-inferred code we saw ~12x improvements. For straight translations w/ fully dynamic ruby we saw marginal performance losses because we couldn't cheat the way the interpreter does (eg regexp match nodes dispatched directly where we had to use rb_funcall or we couldn't take advantage of COW string hacks).

I demonstrated this in my rubyconf 2005 talk. I don't think any video of it exists.

>> c or c++ chould not handle that as simple
> 
> Nobody talked about "simple" though.


Translating was a lot less tough than I thought it would be (compared to, say, the parsing of ruby).