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Tuesday February 06, 2007

HotSpot Scripting

It was some time last year that I got to have an extended discussion with Tim Bray about how we could leverage the Java HotSpot Virtual Machine technology for accelerating scripting languages. If you know Tim you know his passion is infectious -- especially when it comes to scripting languages. This concept has been around for some time... and indeed there is even an extension to the Java platform in the form of the invokedynamic bytecode to support dynamic languages.

What's new, now, is that we have the JRuby Guys here at Sun (right here in Minneapolis -- an unusual colocation in this era of global work!). And I'm championing scripting performance for the Java Performance Group.

Charlie and Tom (et al) have already done some heavy lifting to demonstrate that JRuby 0.9.3's initial compilation efforts provide as much as a 2x performance improvement over Ruby 1.8. JRuby Background: JRuby offers certain advantages over Ruby: better scalability, native Unicode support, compilation, integration with the extensive Java libraries, broader database support, NetBeans IDE support, and an easier path to get Ruby in the enterprise.

So now the opportunity is to combine the performance work already underway with JRuby in tighter integration with HotSpot. As an added bonus we can now all hack on JRuby and HotSpot in the open!

What's even cooler than that is running JRuby on our Coolthreads servers to help save the planet. Oh, and by the way, we have a nice track record of performance including on the environmental SWaP metric. It's almost as if HotSpot's performance were scripted

Posted by tmarble ( Feb 06 2007, 08:51:30 AM CST ) Permalink