Interview: Avi Bryant on MagLev and GemStone

Posted by Werner Schuster on Jun 13, 2008

Sections

Development,

Architecture & Design

Topics

Architecture ,

Runtimes ,

Ruby ,

Technology ,

Ruby on Rails ,

Dynamic Languages ,

Performance & Scalability

Tags

Scalability ,

SmallTalk ,

GemStone ,

MagLev ,

QCon London 2008 ,

QCon ,

Ruby on Rails ,

Object Databases ,

Rails

In this interview Avi Bryant, creator of the Smalltalk Seaside web framework and Co-CEO of DabbleDB talks about GemStone's MagLev project. The interview, taped at QCon London 2008 earlier this year, was one of the first public mentions of GemStone's Ruby implementation MagLev. At the time of the interview, the project had only been going for a few weeks (you'll note  the name MagLev isn't mentioned).

Avi explains the reason for his involvement in the project, the plans (as they were then) for making Ruby work on the GemStone VM, and how GemStone's existing product features, such as transparent persistence and distribution, compare to existing manual approaches using systems like memcached.

Finally, a question from the audience brings up the topic of multiple Ruby implementations and whether they can be seen as a good or bad thing, in light of the fragmented Smalltalk market.

The interview mentions a few articles/blog posts which give further explanations of some of the discussed topics:

• "Ruby and other gems": Avi compares Ruby/memcached solutions to distribution and caching to GemStone's approach.
  
• One of the issues Avi sees with Ruby is the fact that a lot of the Ruby implementations and libraries are not written in Ruby, but with languages like C, Java, C# or others.  In "Turtles all the way down" and the follow up article "Turtles need speed" Avi explains why this is a problem. Mike Pence has a write up of an interview he conducted with Avi on the same topic with more information.
  
• GemStone supports Seaside with their GLASS (GemStone, Linux, Apache, Seaside, Smalltalk) project
  

Watch the "Avi Bryant interview on MagLev and GemStone".

Note: This interview is one part of a longer interview with Avi - the second part will be published on InfoQ soon and include topics such as Seaside, more discussion of Gemstone and GLASS, DabbleDB's design and persistence strategy with Squeak, and much more.

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