Kevin Menard

Posts

  • 2023-06-12 •

    TruffleRuby in Shopify CI

    Shopify is deeply committed to the future of Ruby. One of our key investments is in TruffleRuby — a high-performance implementation of the Ruby language based on cutting edge compiler research. While there are now several JIT compilers available for CRuby, they’re somewhat constrained by CRuby’s architecture. The same approach that allows CRuby to start up quickly and run fast during warm-up also makes it challenging to perform Ruby-level optimizations such as function inlining. In contrast, TruffleRuby is authored predominately in Ruby, allowing its JIT compiler to optimize both application code and the core libraries provided by the language. One big trade-off of this approach is TruffleRuby has needed to implement all of CRuby’s extensive core library in Ruby. It has taken several years for TruffleRuby to reach the desired level of compatibility, but it’s now a robust implementation that can run many complex Ruby workloads, including Rails applications and CRuby native extensions.