ruby-packer VS truffleruby

Ruby Packer: distribute your Ruby code as a compiled binary\ (30 comments)

One way around this limitation is to also include a ruby interpreter along with your source code. There are some projects out there that attempt to do just that, each with their own limitations and degrees of success. One such project is https://github.com/pmq20/ruby-packer. With this, you can give it your ruby code and it will bundle it up with a ruby interpreter so that you can hand out a single executable file to run.

Go has been used at Flipp for some time now, although not widely in my team. I wanted to use Go to create a command-line executable, something that Ruby unfortunately isn't capable of doing. (There are options, such as ruby-packer, but it seems like a "heavy" solution and doesn't seem to fit the Ruby paradigm.)

I think it would be worth mentioning GraalVM and https://github.com/oracle/truffleruby in competitors section.

GitHub page has some info: https://github.com/oracle/truffleruby#current-status

My question is, how viable is TruffleRuby vs JRuby?

I wonder why GraalVM is not more often used for these speed critical cases: https://www.graalvm.org/python/

Is the problem the Oracle involvement? (Same for ruby https://www.graalvm.org/ruby/)

Looks like it’s still a WIP

https://github.com/oracle/truffleruby/commits?author=eregon

this comes at the cost of boxing ints inside Integer, though.

So, if you ignore for a moment primitives types, whenever you have generics, everything boils down to a single method accepting Objects and returning Objects. What the JVM does is to do runtime profiling of what actually you are passing to the generic method, and generate optimized routines for the "best case". In theory this is the best of the two worlds, because like in general you will have a single implementation of the method (avoiding duplication of the code), but if you use it in an hot spot you get the optimized code.

In a way, it is quite wasteful, because you throw away a lot of information at compile time, just to get it back (and maybe not all of it) at runtime through profiling, but in practice it works quite well.

A side effect of this is this makes the JVM a wonderful VM for running dynamic languages like Ruby and Python, because that information is _not_ there at compile time. In particular GraalVM/TruffleVM and exposes this functionality to dynamic language implementations, allowing very good performance (according to they website [1][2], Ruby and Python on TruffleVM are about 8x faster than the official implementation, and JS in line with V8)

[1] https://www.graalvm.org/ruby/

I opened a ticket some time ago about performance with Jekyll and liquid templates. At least in that case, yjit was way faster. I'm happy to retest though. Anything that would make my jekyll builds faster would help.

https://github.com/oracle/truffleruby/issues/2363

Here's a benchmark [1] done in Jan'22 against many ruby implementations, truffleRuby [2] seems to be way ahead in most, and at least ahead in all. Why truffleRuby isn't talk about much here?

[1] https://eregon.me/blog/2022/01/06/benchmarking-cruby-mjit-yj...

[2] https://github.com/oracle/truffleruby