Ruby Implementation Released

[Chris Seaton]

I’m very happy to say that the Truffle implementation of Ruby has been open
sourced and is now part of the Graal repository. This is the work that was
discussed at the JVM Language Summit last year -
http://medianetwork.oracle.com/video/player/2623645003001.

We are also pushing a patch to the JRuby project to start integrating our
implementation as an optional backend. The JRuby project has a history of
being early adopters of new JVM technologies such as invokedynamic, and we
aim to be part of their next major release. This would put Truffle into a
release of a real JVM language for the first time, although just as an
experimental option for people who specifically want to try it.

Ruby is a Smalltalk-inspired language with relatively complex and subtle
semantics that generally frustrates code generation and optimisation. It
works really well with Truffle through specialisation and speculative
optimisations, achieving very good speedup compared to other
implementations. I’m very happy to answer any questions about how it uses
Truffle and Graal.

Chris