Ruby the Hard Way: Writing Bytecode to Optimize Plain Ruby
summary
A toy optimizer gem called optimize gem decodes YARV binaries, rewrites instruction sequences and re-encodes them between Ruby’s dump and eval steps. The pipeline uses hand wrote a prompter and had Quad code build me a compiler, performs inlining, dead‑store elimination and constant folding, reduces cases from 24 instructions down to six, converges in three passes and yields ~1.85× speedups for one example. It’s pinned to a single Ruby minor, breaks tracepoints, coverage and reloading, and miscompiles if core operations are redefined.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction and setup
- 3:48Ruby bytecode basics
- 16:16Building a toy optimizer
- 23:59Optimization pipeline in action
- 27:54Performance gains and limitations
- 30:46Why not use this in practice
- 32:33Conclusion and Q&A
