
Ruby VMs: A Comparison
A look at the different Ruby virtual machines (JRuby, MagLev, IronRuby, Rubinius, MacRuby) and how to choose what fits best within the enterprise.

A look at the different Ruby virtual machines (JRuby, MagLev, IronRuby, Rubinius, MacRuby) and how to choose what fits best within the enterprise.

In this interview, Avi Bryant talks about working on GemStone's MagLev, a Ruby implementation built on the GemStone S64 VM. Avi explains the reasons for MagLev, the merits of GemStone's persistence and distribution features, and the future with multiple Ruby implementations.
The MagLev project has released version 1.0 of their Ruby VM. The Ruby implementation is based on the GemStone/S Smalltalk VM which comes with GemStone's distributed cache, ACID transactions, and persistence system (OODB). InfoQ caught up with Monty Williams of the MagLev project to talk about where MagLev fits on the NoSQL spectrum, and much more.
The standardization of Ruby is making progress: after the announcement in 2008, a first draft of the standard has been published. What does this mean for RubySpec, the executable Ruby specification, and the other Ruby implementations?
The long awaited MagLev Ruby implementation, based on GemStone Smalltalk, is now available in a public alpha release. While not quite ready to run Rails, it does support frameworks like Rack and Sinatra. MagLev comes with full support for GemStone's mature distribution and persistence features.
IronRuby's alive and kicking - and will go 1.0 in July. We look at some resources to get up to speed with IronRuby's status. Also: JRuby 1.3.1 is an important bug fix update for JRuby users, MacRuby continues to improve and MagLev now comes with a native parser.
JRuby 1.3 will allow to reduce startup times in some situations using Nailgun. Nokogiri, a popular XML library, now runs on the latest JRuby thanks to ruby-ffi. Finally: Ruby 1.9.1-p129 is a new release that fixes a few bugs and security issues.
New versions of Ruby 1.8.6 and 1.8.7 are available now. JRuby development moves ahead with experiments with running JRuby on IKVM. Also: MacRuby continues performance work and MagLev now runs RubyGems.
Ruby's performance is being improved on all fronts. The GC gets help from REE's work on the COW GC and some tunings tips help to fine tune it. MacRuby's VM keeps on improving and tail call optimization was recently added. Also: news of a MagLev Beta in Q2.
In this presentation from QCon San Francisco 2008, Jason Seifer takes a look at the different Ruby virtual machines (JRuby, MagLev, IronRuby, Rubinius, MacRuby) and how to choose what fits best within the enterprise.
Antonio Cangiano has again benchmarked all Ruby VMs, MRI 1.8 and 1.9.1, REE, JRuby, Rubinius, IronRuby and MagLev. The results show the steady improvement of the performance of all VMs - and a few surprising lessons of how the performance of MRI can vary.