From: avi@...4.com (Avi Bryant)
Date: 2003-09-01T03:05:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Why would you abandon Ruby? (was)

Robert Feldt <feldt@ce.chalmers.se> wrote:

> Parts of the Animorphic VM has been released as open-source but not the
> critical parts; its a shame since it would make for a good start for
> an optimizing jitter for Ruby.

From what I've gathered talking to VM folks and seeing David Griswold
demo Strongtalk, the Animorphic code was very complex and unwieldy - I
doubt it would make a good basis for an open source project.

If you were looking for a faster VM for Ruby, I would try to use one
of the simpler, fully open source Smalltalks - either Gnu or Squeak. 
That way you can take advantage of whatever optimization is done for
them (and there's a much stronger culture of optimization in the
Smalltalk world).  This should be doable, in theory, since the Ruby
and Smalltalk object models are nearly identical.

Something to watch is Eliot Miranda and Paolo Bonzini's AOStA project
- they're building Strongtalk-like optimizations at the Smalltalk
level rather than in the VM.  The idea is to have a very simple JITted
VM, with all the complex SSA analysis, inlining, type inferencing,
etc, being done as a library of bytecode->bytecode optimizations. 
Doing it in Smalltalk rather than C++ should allow the complexity to
be managed much more easily.