Benchmarking Ruby 2.6 to 3.2
gettalong.org
gettalong.org
Seems like most of the Ruby gains are related to memory usage.
Python has gotten significantly faster, has static typing built in with an ecosystem of static typecheckers, and async is an ergonomic first class language feature - sure async can have rough edges but the 99.9% case is dead simple with no surprises.
Obviously packaging for Python is still a pain but I don’t see Ruby being better
Did you mean this the other way around?
Rails and Django are both still super popular from scanning job listings, so e-commerce employment wise they’re both great.
FastAPI is also growing a lot.
Big Data leans heavily Python
IIWM I'd go with Ruby hands down.
Julia, though, if you're looking for a language that isn't OO in addition to functional.
All the synthetic benchmarks I've seen claim that Ruby is at least on par with Python's speed if not faster. Like this https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
But then speed in a dynamic language is often very context dependent. If I want to do Rails I won't choose Python. If I want to do machine learning, Python is the obvious choice.
> Obviously packaging for Python is still a pain but I don’t see Ruby being better
Ruby packaging just works whereas Python's is a pain. Can't see how you don't see it being better.
> The Python 3.11 release announcement cites 10~60% improvements over Python 3.10 and a 1.22x speed-up for its standard benchmark suite.
Python 3.11.1
https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
The recent Python benchmarks all seem to use the same benchmark suite (which is incredibly complex to the point that it's unclear what is actually being measured) or hype the Microsoft involvement.
Even if you believe them, it is just 10-60% speedup for a very slow language. It won't show up in web applications.
Python has no static typing. It has type annotations, which a few 3rd party static analysers such as mypy use. Ruby has had the same since 3.0 with rbs. The ecosystem may be less mature, but it exists, and Python's isn't necessarily perfect.
Python async is terrible. You have to colorize functions, opt out from a significant part of the ecosystem which either does not support async, or is very unstable, and completely relearn how to do debugging / performance measurement. Ruby has smth better since ruby 3.0, via the fiber scheduler, which supports running network related code asynchronously with *no changes or special function annotations*.
Ruby packaging has been figured out since 2007, and has been influencial for other ecosystems, being the first mainstream language adopting lockfiles.
If you prefer using Python, you are entitled to your opinion and choice. But those arguments are all FUD.
Microsoft is also one of the best language/compiler company in the world.
PHP gains were independent of FB.
That would be a welcome addition, especially with Rails where you typically end up running your web app, background worker and action cable as separate processes. That's (3) running services each booting up your application to some degree.
Combine that with most apps using very little CPU and more and more memory, it's nice to be able to reduce memory when you can to optimize the machines you host things on. It always feels dirty having a server using 60% memory and 5% CPU.
Ruby 3.2 and production-ready YJIT feel like a big deal as someone who has been in the Rails and Ruby ecosystem for 15 years.
Rails in particular has seemed to be very difficult to optimize for performance in Ruby, and YJIT seems to have done it.
And YJIT's creator, Shopify, is already using it in production with Ruby 3.2 for all their store fronts!
Numbers were generated using https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/script/benc... if anyone wants to try it out too.
We already have 3.2 working internally and plan to roll it out to everyone soon.
> By default, YJIT does not get compiled and cargo/rustc is not required. If YJIT is built in dev mode, then cargo is used to fetch development dependencies, but when building in release, cargo is not required, only rustc. At the moment YJIT requires Rust 1.60.0 or newer.
Do JIT compilers suffer from boxing pointer chasing primitives since everything is an object and not a memory location value type?
Can hot loops over arrays be efficient if every item in the array is a pointer?
Dynamic properties, non-uniform object shapes may be more responsible for this generic slowness of very dynamic languages, and from what I gathered assuming a shape for these objects constitutes a kind of advanced optimization (done by JS engines, truffleruby, not sure about these engines), even if its done depending on language idioms it may not give that big of a boost. Ruby is a very dynamic language with e.g. hitting not implememted methods and dynamically handling, etc.
My understanding is that determining jump target at compile time is a big source of performance gain at runtime. If you know the function to jump to at compile time and not wait to runtime to decide where to jump.
I've looked into arrays of structs and structs or arrays for performance. But I am curious how to create a managed language that is fast. I think we look Java and C# for guidance.
Well, I don’t know about more dynamic languages, but single dispatch can be very well optimized away, Java for example can determine how many possible implementation of a given method is loaded, and simply JIT compile or even inline the function if there is only a single implementation. Later, it can deoptimize that call, e.g. when a new class is loaded at runtime that also implements that method. This is one area where JIT is definitely in a better position than AOT compilers.
Ruby was never designed as a “fast” language, but 3x is a huge number for anything this mature.
All benchmarks are misleading but it shows 10x slower than java, lisp, and pascal. Is there a reason that isn't actually representative of idiomatic use?
With regards to what "idiomatic use" is for Ruby, we could argue that most ruby apps are web backends and most of those spend the majority of their waiting for DB and/or API calls and don't spend all that much doing work in actual Ruby.
Go(lang) about 5-6k.
EDIT: I was curious on how many req/s modern Ruby would actually do for simple hello world, so I coded up the smallest Hello world example from https://github.com/rack/rack and ran it with the (default) Puma webserver, limited to 4 threads (and thus cores) with `-t 4`. According to `ab`, it averages around 8500 requests per second over a sample size of 100k requests. I didn't find out how to run rack apps with YJIT yet, but it seems reasonable to expect that to speed it up a bit further.
wrk -c 6000
I doubt you had 65k concurrent.
Rps around 200k