Strange Loop

2009 - 2023

/

St. Louis, MO

Why Ruby isn't Slow

Ruby, perhaps more than any other dynamic language, has a reputation for being slow. But this doesn't have to be. I've spent the last year building Topaz, a high performance Ruby VM, built on the same technologies that power PyPy. This talk will be an overview of what makes a Ruby VM slow, and how we solved.

Some examples:

* Method dispatch
* Constant lookups
* Allocation of integers, floats, and other "primitives" on the heap

Alex Gaynor

Alex Gaynor

Rackspace

Alex is a software engineer at Rackspace. He spends much of his time working on open source projects such as Topaz, PyPy, CPython, and Django, as well as serving on the Board of Directors for the Python Software Foundation.