A History of the Rubinius Ruby JIT

Wow. This whole site is amazing, Chris. I found and skimmed through the part you've written on my compiler as well, and it's amazing how much effort you've put into digging into it. I'll have to spend some time going through the ones you've written so far in detail.

I haven't touched my compiler much for most of last year and this year, but I have a half-finished GC sitting my local tree that I really should wrap up. At the moment what's stopping it from compiling itself correctly is a couple of small bug fixes plus some GC and overall allocation improvements (it's creating way too much garbage to start with, which I'm sure you noticed).

Oh wow I didn't know the JIT had been removed from rubinius.

I was a (pretty minor) contributor to rubinius back in its llvm heyday and it was a pretty transformative project for me, in terms of enabling my understanding of VMs, garbage collection, and language architecture. Even then llvm felt like a pretty heavy weight for JIT uses, but there really wasn't anything else out there then that could perform at its level. I think nowadays there'd probably be some better choices out there. Maybe cranelift.

I wound up spinning a lot of that off into my own attempt at a "VM built in itself" project that never got to the point of JITing code it did run its own "glue language" (compiled by ruby code into vm bytecode) that was used to build somewhat functioning ruby (passed like 70% of then-current rusbyspec I think?) and python support without the VM itself being aware of the language semantics. It was a really fun time in my career.

Later I used the basic understanding of LLVM it gave me to take part in the effort to port Swift to linux even, which was also a really good time for me.

I've never used Rubinius in production but over 10 years ago, when I was still relatively new to Ruby, I used to read Rubinius source code to understand how some Ruby methods worked under the hood.

Even though Rubinius has never reached the popularity it aimed for, I'm forever grateful for the effort that's been put into creating it.

I didn't even know Rubinius was still around.

Last I knew, they worked hard to develop a standard and test suite for 1.9.x which the Ruby team used for one release before promptly breaking everything.

It's yet another example of why programming language standards are important.