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MagLev, Ruby VM on Gemstone OODB, Wows RailsConf

Posted by kdawson on Sat May 31, 2008 11:02 PM
from the rails-oh-i-get-it dept.
Databases Programming Software IT
murphee ends along a report from InfoQ: "Gemstone demoed [MagLev,] their Ruby VM built on their GemStone S64 VM, to an ecstatic audience. Gemstone's Smalltalk VM allows OODBs of up to 17 PetaBytes, with none of the old ActiveRecord nonsense: the data is persisted transparently. The Gemstone OODB also takes care of any distribution, allowing the Ruby VM and data to scale across many servers (Cheerio, memcached!). There's also an earlier quite technical interview with Gemstone's Bob Walker and Avi Bryant about MagLev."
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Submission: MagLev: Ruby VM on Gemstone OODB Wows RailsConf by Anonymous Coward
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  • I'm sorry... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 31 2008, @11:03PM (#23614609)
    What?

    • Re:I'm sorry... (Score:5, Informative)

      by corsec67 (627446) on Saturday May 31 2008, @11:06PM (#23614615) Homepage Journal
      Agreed, I develop in Ruby on Rails full-time, and I barely understood 1/3 of that summary.

      OODB = Object Oriented Database (possibly a OODB type of model) helps in translating that from specialist to mere geek.
      • Then maybe you've just been too busy for keeping up with the news.

        http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/04/maglev-gemstone-builds-ruby [infoq.com]

        and I'm not even a Rails developer, just a Ruby enthusiast.
      • I thought the OODBMS fad was finally dead. OODB's resurrect many of the problematic ideas that drove Dr. Codd to formulate relational to begin with. Thus, they could be considered a step backwards. But this would start a paradigm Holy War here and we don't want that, do we?
        • Not really OODB, while I agree with you is a fad in that they are more interesting then useful (so far anyway) but they are not what Codd was aiming to fix.

          I am way to young to have been their but I do recall the history portions of my computer science education. Hey even in engineering like disiplines those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it. What existed before RDBs at least in the saleable world were table systems based on flat files with no integrity checking and implemented without

        • A step backwards? A fad? How exactly is designing a database capable of doing things that RDBMS cannot (or cannot do easily, that does not matter) supposed to be "a step backwards"? There are tasks for which using an RDBMS is simply inadequate, but since the problem still does not fit into memory, you still need some form of database (if we define "database" as a piece of software capable of handling a big amount of data that does not force you to think how yo store it and lets you do the creative work).

          W

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by snl2587 (1177409)

          And I, for one, wouldn't want to work for you for failing to understand what the GP was saying.

    • Great Ruby news (Score:5, Informative)

      by Santana (103744) on Saturday May 31 2008, @11:56PM (#23614799) Homepage
      Maglev is the long awaited (by Rubyists at least) Ruby VM (virtual machine) developed by Gemstone, who also develop an OODB (use Wikipedia for this one, you can do it).

      Railsconf is a good opportunity for Gemstone to show off their object persistence, since it would benefit Ruby on Rails (which uses O/RM that may not be necessary any more.)

    • Re:I'm sorry... (Score:4, Informative)

      by ESqVIP (782999) on Sunday June 01 2008, @12:55AM (#23614989)

      Indeed, incredibly poor summary.

      Basically, GemStone, a company which has been working on large-scale object-oriented database systems [wikipedia.org] and a Smalltalk implementation (GemStone/S) for decades, has decided to support Ruby on their infrastructure. Turns out Ruby is indeed quite similar to Smalltalk, and some microbenchmarks already show them as being 8~60x faster than MRI (the main Ruby 1.8 implementation). Should those numbers remain consistent, this will be an incredibly fast implementation of a popular scripting language, surpassing by Python, PHP, Lua, and other Ruby implementations in raw numbers.

      This might be a massive push for Ruby/Rails on "enterprise" systems. And if they succeed, this could also be one interesting step reviving the popularity of OODBMSs.

      • Re:I'm sorry... (Score:5, Informative)

        by pnagel (107544) on Sunday June 01 2008, @04:13AM (#23615605)

        Basically, GemStone, a company which has been working on large-scale object-oriented database systems [wikipedia.org] and a Smalltalk implementation (GemStone/S)

        You make it sound as if the object oriented database and the Smalltalk implementation are two separate products. Which is a common misconception.

        To oversimplify, GemStone's Smalltalk VM is an OODB. It adds the following features to the language:
            1) Begin transaction, commit transaction, abort transaction.
            2) All of your process space, your global variables, your datastructures etc. are persisted. You can switch power-cycle your computer and have the same program running as used to run before.

        I'm sure they did the same for Ruby with maglev.

        This approach cuts out layers and layers of persistence crap. Bye bye object-relational persistence mapping crud.

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by ESqVIP (782999)

          Definitely not. They've been talking about a free-gratis version, and there's chance they will open some of their standard library (possibly sharing part of it with Rubinius, since both have a similar goal of writing as much as possible directly in Ruby), but you shouldn't expect them opening their VM or OODB stuff anytime soon.

          But well, if anything, they show how far open implementations of dynamic languages can get performance-wise. The current breed of languages has always lagged behind the old ones (l

  • An audience that needs ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Marbleless (640965) on Saturday May 31 2008, @11:06PM (#23614617)
    >Gemstone demoed [MagLev,] their Ruby VM built on their GemStone S64 VM, to an ecstatic audience.

    An audience that needs ...

    a) to buy some vowels, and
    b) to find significant others to get ecstatic about! ;)

  • Sad . . . (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 31 2008, @11:10PM (#23614631)
    > murphee ends along a report from InfoQ

    I am sorry to hear of murphee's death, and hope that no more lives are claimed by this report's incomprehensibility.

  • Shot in the dark (Score:4, Insightful)

    by smitty_one_each (243267) * on Saturday May 31 2008, @11:24PM (#23614685) Homepage Journal
    "MagLev, Ruby VM on Gemstone OODB, Wows RailsConf"
    Some magnetic levitation involving rubies, VM (Ware?), more gems, object oriented databases (didn't they die?), World of Warcraft, rails (magnetic levitation again?), and, finally, conference.
    Doesn't the Lameness Filter usually take care of this sort of thing?

    • Re:Shot in the dark (Score:5, Funny)

      by noidentity (188756) on Sunday June 01 2008, @03:46AM (#23615541)
      Just yesterday I was working on SuperCollider, hooking it with OilRig, implemented with SuperTanker, using ConcreteRoad as the substrate. I had some problems with the DeepSea module, but it was really due to RadioAntenna. You're confused? These are just the names of some database libraries, nothing to do with what their names imply.

  • Talk really did wow the conference (Score:5, Informative)

    by stockmaster (574940) on Sunday June 01 2008, @12:17AM (#23614871) Homepage
    This talk was one of the highlights of the conference. At the talk, they showed performance benchmarks that included running several things as much as 117x as fast as the default Ruby interpreter that is in use by most Rails installations today. The fact that it's built on this commercial-grade Gemstone platform that has been used for years for high-performance production Smalltalk applications just adds to its credibility.

    One of the reasons this is exciting is that many Ruby/Rails programmers have suffered from the criticism that their platform is elegant and fast to develop in, but that it doesn't scale well. MagLev sure looked like it could go a long way toward addressing those concerns. And since it hits Ruby right at the VM level, it is potentially useful to anyone running any kind of Ruby app whether on Rails or not.

    Of course, we'll see when it's done...
    • Doubtful. When people have scalability problems it's not ruby, it's rails. Web applications don't need much cpu but they do need to use memory in a reasonably efficient manner - something that rails cannot currently do.

    • At the talk, they showed performance benchmarks that included running several things as much as 117x as fast as the default Ruby interpreter that is in use by most Rails installations today. The fact that it's built on this commercial-grade Gemstone platform that has been used for years for high-performance production Smalltalk applications just adds to its credibility.

      "The fact that it's built on this commercial-grade Gemstone platform that has been used for years for high-performance production Smalltalk applications just" means that they're going to keep their proprietary solution to themselves and make lots of money.

      Gemstone has spent a lot of time optimizing their code, are they just going to give that away for free?

  • Ruby Shootout (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cryptoluddite (658517) on Sunday June 01 2008, @12:18AM (#23614873)

    The MagLev VM, although only partially implemented, so far outperforms MRI 1.8.
    Being 'faster than 1.8' is a pretty weak claim compared to the competition:

    Ruby 1.9: 3.32x
    XRuby: 1.43x
    JRuby: 1.32x
    Ruby 1.8: 1.0x
    Rubinius: 0.73x
    Ruby.NET: 0.56x

    What is cool is how well the Java-based Ruby implementations do: JRuby and XRuby. JRuby was the only Ruby implementation that did not have any tests error. For a VM that is supposedly so hostile to dynamic languages, those implementations were faster and more reliable than the actual Ruby VM and cleaned the floor with the CLR/.NET implementation. And the next version of Java should have stack allocations and invokedynamic bytecode and other optimizations.

    What this shows to me is, first do one thing well (Java), then figure out how to grow it. In contrast to .NET/CLR which started out trying to do everything and ended up doing few things well.

    • Being 'faster than 1.8' is a pretty weak claim compared to the competition:

      Well, Matz's Ruby (or MRI) is still _the_ reference, so it makes sense to compare to it. What is really missing is how fast Maglev is. This blog post [obiefernandez.com] talks about 8x to 60x faster, which is impressive.

          • Ruby's syntax is not better than smalltalk - it's more complicated. the only thing "better" about it, is that it sometimes vaguely resembles C syntax.

            Smalltalk's syntax is not complicated enough. Algol syntax has dominated for 60 years. If you think having a C-like syntax is a flaw then you are not thinking rationally.

            "precedence" is not sane - it's a complicated set of exceptions that make a programing language more complicated to implement, but don't really gain anything.

            So they teach math using hungarian notation in schools... where exactly? Our natural languages contain precedence and all sorts of complicated syntax that we are hardwired to understand. Smalltalk fails because it wants to be 'pure' and 'simple' in places where that is not an advantage.

      • Re:Ruby Shootout (Score:4, Interesting)

        by cryptoluddite (658517) on Sunday June 01 2008, @04:40AM (#23615695)
        I took a look at some more of the benchmarks and they are pretty much universally meaningless once you throw in a good optimizing VM. For instance translating the method benchmark into Java and having it loop 2^31 times instead of 6 million times and Java is 29,000 times faster than Ruby 2.8.

        Adding a simple global+=1 to the method body makes Java only 16,000 times faster than Ruby 2.8.

        Replacing the +1 with global*=5 makes the Java version only 536 times faster than Ruby 2.8.

        These are the kinds of optimizations MagLev is doing, and they don't translate into anywhere near the gains in actual code. So you see, you really need to rethink your tests. Even for something seemingly ok like modifying a global can depend on how it is modified and what the VM can optimize (+1 vs *5). Frankly I would just test these different Ruby implementations using the regular shootout [debian.org] code, since these have been designed not to be optimized out.
  • Neither the summary nor TFA inspired me with awe. Guess I'm losing it.
    • It's because they chose to constantly reference trains. Nobody plays with trains anymore. They're past the point where they can be considered "old skool" and are now just a dead hobby. Now if they had gone with Warhammer 40k references, people would get all excited about the new Warp Storm VM system!

  • Video of Avi Bryant talk from 2007 (Score:4, Informative)

    by OldManAndTheC++ (723450) on Sunday June 01 2008, @12:46AM (#23614963)
    Avi Bryant gave a fascinating talk [railsconf.blip.tv] about bringing technology developed for Smalltalk into the Ruby world at RailsConf 2007. Apropos of nothing, he bears an uncanny resemblance to Jeremy Davies [imdb.com] (Daniel Faraday on "Lost").

    Basically he's saying that many of the performance issues with the much-maligned Ruby VM were solved years ago in Smalltalk implementations, and that Ruby ought to incorporate those ideas. Maglev is a big step in this direction.

  • This is getting sillly. (Score:3, Funny)

    by MrMista_B (891430) on Sunday June 01 2008, @01:04AM (#23615023)
    From Wikipedia (yeah it's not a source that's reliable at all, but this is the internet): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev [wikipedia.org]

    "Magnetic levitation, maglev, or magnetic suspension is a method by which an object is suspended with no support other than magnetic fields. The electromagnetic force is used to counteract the effects of the gravitational force."

    If they're doing *that* with code, I'll be hell of impressed. If not, that's a pretty strange way to brand your project/product/language/whatever that is. Seriously, I'm sure it's awesome, but what is it with all these things (MagLev, Ruby, etc) trying to sound cool by appropriating names of other, already well-established 'things'?

    Or next am I going to be using "Ice-cream, Santa Claus on Purple Monkey OODB with Cowboy Hat and Kitchen Fork to PWN the OMGWTFBBQ on the MBA with the XKCD in the Ballroom with the Candlestick"?

    Seriously, these names are getting silly.

    Not that 'Linux' or 'Ubuntu' or 'MySQL' sound any less silly to people not familiar with them, but at least they're not likely to be confusing or confused for something else.

    */minirant*
    • Uh, it's called Ruby on RAILS... like a train. MagLev is a really really fast train. Seems like a pretty sensible name to me.
    • It's a joke, really. Ruby on Rails. MagLev trains are faster than normal trains, so Ruby on MagLev should be faster. It's faster rails. That said, it would be great if the headline and summary were rewritten to make this understandable.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Sique (173459)
        With regular trains reaching 575 km/h (357 mph) and the world record for MagLevs being 581 km/h (361 mph), there is really no difference in speed for both technologies.
  • You mean like the open source Zope [zope.org] (written in Python), invented over 10 years ago [wikipedia.org]? Great, now I can tie my open source language to a closed-source object store.

  • news that matters? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nguy (1207026) on Sunday June 01 2008, @05:00AM (#23615775)
    Gemstone is a proprietary implementation of Smalltalk and an associated object database. Who does it matter to whether they incorporate a RubyVM into their system or not?

    Gemstone also stands for the failure of a particular kind of business model. These people (and others) had a mature OO programming language that was orders of magnitude faster than Ruby, had object persistence, had a great IDE, and supported distributed programming over 15 years ago, and they pissed it all away by making it too expensive and too proprietary.

    Because the Smalltalk vendors were greedy and squabbling among themselves, modern OOP arrived more than a decade later in in much poorer form.

    I suppose hiding their Smalltalk heritage by calling their system "Gemstone/S" and being forced to incorporate Ruby in order to make their platform attractive is the ultimate indignity.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by angdraug (518388)

        You can download GemStone/S 64 Web Edition for free, and use it free (for commercial use, too!). Only when your database grows beyond about 2 gigs, you need to get a license, which is about $7000 a year.

        Nowhere near good enough. $7000 a year is the exact outrage the previous poster was talking about. And 2 gigs is not much if you consider that it has to hold all your objects and their fleas. Not to mention that it's not really free (as in freedom) until it can be found in Debian/main.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by nguy (1207026)
        That's changing.

        Evidently not.

        You can download GemStone/S 64 Web Edition for free, and use it free (for commercial use, too!). Only when your database grows beyond about 2 gigs, you need to get a license, which is about $7000 a year.

        It's that sort of bullshit that killed systems like Smalltalk in the market. Companies like Gemstone will still be able to extract money from their captive audience for a couple of decades, but mainstream platforms are eating away at their market share, year after year.

        The only

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by catch23 (97972)
      Just so you know, gemstone isn't exactly new, it might be as old, or older than some of those Oracle products and have been running in production environments for years. Just because you've never heard of it doesn't mean it's brand new. There's quite a few old financial companies running on smalltalk systems built by gemstone. Unfortunately, much of Smalltalk's history has been closed-source. Even the GPL Squeak was late to the game (1997). Fortunately, smalltalk is a pretty simple language so it's act
      • It is new. Its never been used in conjunction with ruby before, but thats not really that important. I was really talking about my comfort level with the product. I never want to be the largest user of a closed source product. Who uses it? Under what kind of loads? How many servers?
        • Well yeah, ruby is new to gemstone. But only a few years ago Java was a closed source product too. Closed source vendors like Gemstone are taking notice of Ruby because Ruby is beginning to make significant inroads to the enterprise world. A few large enterprises may take notice of Gemstone and be their customers much like Java in its early days. Java did have its problems too, but I don't see how an open source implementation would have improved it's likelihood of survival. Version 1.0 of any product,

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by WeirdJohn (1170585)
          JP Morgan uses Gemstone/S behind it's financial systems. I'd say that's a fairly major user. As I understand it MagLev is basically the Gemstone/S Smalltalk VM extended to understand Ruby bytecodes. They (Gemstone) state that the same VM can run Smalltalk, indeed Ruby will be able to talk to Smalltalk objects transparently. The only real questions are how much more complex does Ruby make the VM (Smalltalk VMs are absurdly simple), and what does this complexity do to stability (Smalltalk VMs typically stan
      • Squeak is most definitely not GPL. It was under a special Apple Open Source license thingy for a while (maybe the APL itself, I don't know) and has now been relicensed under an MIT/X11 license. The squeak community is actually very hostile to the GPL, so you'll see most projects under MIT/X11.
    • You may want to google gemstone and "avi bryant".

      Google is a fantastic resource to ease your ignorance.

      Remember just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't exit.
      • k, found his blog [avibryant.com] where he describes gemstone a little better. Still sounds limited. There is still only one data store in gemstone according to the blog post. Can it be scaled beyond that? How? I've never heard of any big website using gemstone. If it was open, I'd be more willing to kick its tires, knowing that small problems could be fixed and a community might arise around it. I'm less confident about the same happening around a closed source product that isn't in wide use by large data driven websites.

        • Re:Sounds cool, but not open (Score:4, Informative)

          by tshawkins (1239974) on Sunday June 01 2008, @12:40AM (#23614947)
          its a single data cloud instance on a distributed data system, in that respect its similar to products like Amazons SDB and Google's BigTable systems. The data is virtualised across a number of data stores. A lot of telecos use gemstone, its used a lot in financials. Its a True OODBMS which is exactly the model that the ORM layers in frameworks like rails are attempting to simulate on a relational database. OODBMS systems match the datamodel of modern web frameworks closer than any relational system every will do. Other Commercial OODBMS systems are system such as ObjectStore, POET, there a few opensource ones such as GOODS
          • Further research on gemstone's scalability [gemstone.com] sounds promising. Still have reservations, and would still like to have a non press release review of its capabilities by an independant third party.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by rossifer (581396)

            Its a True OODBMS which is exactly the model that the ORM layers in frameworks like rails are attempting to simulate on a relational database.

            That's a very silly statement.

            I don't use an ORM to simulate an OODBMS. I use an ORM so that I have a system with both Object Oriented and Relational programming models and can use either one when appropriate. There are a lot of people who don't understand the value of Relational programming, and they think that those of us using RDBMS's would really prefer OODBMS's

              • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

                by rossifer (581396)

                Perhaps you have yet to really understand how an object model that isn't driven by the constraints of the underlying RDMS can make the problem simpler.

                There are vanishingly few cases where following the conventions of an RDBMS will limit your options in OO design. I have certainly come across instances where my initial object design didn't cleanly fit into relational tables, however, the issue was usually revealed to be a problem in the object design that would have caused even more problems later. In my

        • >here is still only one data store in gemstone according to the blog post. Can it be scaled beyond that?

          You mean beyond the 17 petrabytes it supports now?

          >How?

          You add more instances (servers). Any modification made to any server will propogate to the other servers.

          >I've never heard of any big website using gemstone.

          So? Why should I care whether you have heard of something or not? Why is that relevant?

          Have you ever heard of seaside? Smalltalk? Dabbledb?

          >If it was open, I'd be more willing to kick

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