truffleruby VS Mezzano

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

Have you made or plan to make any contributions to Mezzano (https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano) or are you mainly interested in seeing how far you can take this thing on your own?

>> except building compilers and OSes

SBCL is written in Lisp, yes? Except the runtime, which is C + asm.

I've heard people wrote some OSes in the past, like Genera. Or if you prefer recent attempt, try https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano. Never tried it, though.

No need to.

Not at all. See mezzano for a notable recent example of an OS written entirely in a dynamic language.

So..

"Why do you want to make Lisp more popular? If you were sucessful, what would be different in the world, and why is that desirable to you?"

Normally at this point I'd listen to the response, and ask more questions based on that. That would wind up with a very, very deep thread, so I'll break a cardinal rule and pre-guess at some answers.

This kind of question comes up pretty frequently. In many cases, I suspect the motivation behind the question is "Wow! Here's this cool tool I've discovered. I want to make something really useful with it. I want to do it as part of a community effort; share my excitement with others, share in their excitement, and know that what I'm making is useful because others find it desirable and are excited by it." The field could be cooking, sports, old machine tools, tiny homes, or demo scene. Its the fundemental driver for most content on HN, YouTube, Instructables, and such. It is a Good Thing.

If that is your motivator, then my suggestion is to find something that bugs you and fix it. You've already decided you're only interested in code, not other aspects. You said you preferred vim, but the emacs ecosystem has a very rich set of sharp edges that need filing off, and a rich set of tools with which to attack them.

One example: even after 50 years there's no open IDE which allows you to easily globally rename a Lisp identifier. I don't know about LispWorks or other proprietary environments, but you can't in emacs or vim do a right-click on "foo" in "(defun foo ()...)" and select a command which automatically renames it in all invocations. [Queue lots of "but you can..." replies here.] I don't think vim is up to the task of doing this internally. It would be possible in emacs; but would require a huge effort with lots of help from other people. If you emerged alive from that rabbit warren you'd join the company of Certified "How Hard Could it Be?" Mad Scientists such as Dr. "I just want to draw molecules" Meister [1] and "Wouldn't an OS in Lisp be Cool" Froggey [2].

[1] https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp

[2] Mezzano https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano

You might want to look at Mezzano which is an operation system written in Common Lisp https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano

I haven’t tried it since moving to M1/ARM, but it is cool.