A History of Compiling Ruby
summary
History catalogs at least sixteen attempts to compile Ruby down to machine code, lists concrete outcomes (JRuby runs in production via JVM bytecode, TruffleRuby uses Graal VM with self-specializing AST interpreters and partial evaluation, YJIT and MJIT land in MRI), names tools (LLVM, Graal, JVM), and highlights surprising forks and dead ends (Rubinius, Topaz, Hoxstad). Each entry records approach, whether it’s AOT or JIT, the number of tiers or optimizations tried, and whether generated native code actually ran and deoptimized.
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chapters (21)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:54What is a Ruby Compiler
- 3:45Why is it worth looking at compilers
- 6:08What we are not doing
- 6:30The 25 compilers
- 7:13The key compilers
- 8:38The dead compilers
- 9:47Fun niche compilers
- 10:33Timeline of compilers
- 11:56Family trees
- 13:27Groups
- 13:59Ahead or Just in Time
- 15:11Serious Implementations
- 15:50Custom Implementations
- 16:30ReImplementations
- 17:23Hotstats
- 19:18Rubinius
- 22:01JRuby
- 25:02Compiler Research
- 27:45Automatic Compiling
- 30:58Outro
