I'm a Researcher (Senior Staff Engineer) at Shopify , where I work on the Ruby programming Language, and a Visitor at the University of Manchester .
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Outside my day job doing compiler research at Shopify, I lead the Cheshire Yeomanry , a squadron of British Army Reserve light cavalry . I spend about a hundred days a year of my spare-time in evenings, weekends, and holidays, training my Squadron.
There’s a proposal to add Software Transactional Memory , or STM , to the Ruby programming language. This is part of a wider effort to add better support for concurrency and parallelism in Ruby, and in particular the idea of ractors . A concept has been proposed and implemented by Koichi Sasada.
TruffleRuby started as my internship project at Oracle Labs in early 2013. It is an implementation of the Ruby programming language on the JVM, using the Graal dynamic compiler and the Truffle AST interpreter framework . TruffleRuby can achieve peak performance well beyond that possible in JRuby at the same time as…
These are the notes for a talk I gave at RubyKaigi 2021, which is why they’re written as if we were talking and going through some slides and code together.
People who write Ruby programs want to use metaprogramming. It’s part of what makes the language what it is. But in existing implementations of Ruby, metaprogramming is slow. My work focused on making it fast, providing fast tooling for Ruby programmers, and fast support for legacy C extensions.