Ruby gets chrome plated with V8
Ruby could get a huge performance boost with V8, the Javascript virtual machine at the heart of Google Chrome according to a blog posting by Marc André Cournoyer. Cournoyer took the V8 engine and plugged it into HotRuby creating rbv8
, and ran some benchmarks.
In one simple benchmark, rbv8
took 0.987 seconds. The same benchmark took 9.565 seconds in Ruby 1.8.6, making rbv8 ten times faster. A C version of the benchmark executed in 3.322 seconds, but comments indicate the C code was somewhat unoptimised. Cournoyer advises caution with these benchmark numbers; other benchmarks he ran had rbv8
running slower, often much slower.
For a simple hack though, done in less than 24 hours after V8 was released, it opens up the possibility that V8 could potentially be a key to better Ruby performance.
(djwm)