Comparison of Nine Ruby Implementations

An anonymous reader writes "Zen and the Art of Programming published a new version of The Great Ruby Shootout, which was aimed at testing the performances of multiple Ruby implementations. On the benchmark table this time around are Ruby 1.8 (on GNU/Linux and Windows), Ruby 1.9 (aka Yarv), Ruby Enterprise Edition (aka REE), JRuby 1.1.6RC1, Rubinius, MagLev, MacRuby 0.3 and IronRuby. The results of this comprehensive comparison show that for this set of benchmarks, Ruby 1.9.1 is almost 5 times faster than the notoriously slow Ruby 1.8. Is Ruby finally going to be acceptably fast?"

Re:JRuby is the clear winner

[JesseMcDonald]

There were a couple tests that were much slower in JRuby, but this is countered by the test that failed on Ruby 1.9.1; fast means nothing when you don't finish.

Ruby 1.9.1 failed two tests; JRuby failed three.

None of the VMs managed to complete all the tests. Other than Rubinius, which timed out frequently, Ruby 1.9.1 had the fewest errors.

Also, the input sizes for many of the tests numbered in the millions. If that's not enough repetition to take advantage of hotspot optimization, then I'd say they were right to exclude it.

Re:Ruby 1.9.1 and JRuby

[K. S. Kyosuke]

"Ultimately what I want is an interpreted language that can be compiled. So for example, in python one rarely actually uses the introspective ability to modify ones self, or even takes advantage of duck typing. instead one usually calls functions with the same type arguments and so forth. So if one just had the ability to switch off the dynamic typing and self-modifying capabilities so that one could compile it it sure would be one sweet language."

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Common Lisp hackers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced...