I haven't looked at the benchmarks, but are they synthetic or are they actually relevant to typical rails usage?
See our Acid Test benchmark for an exteme example http://chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/pushing-pixels/
Evan Phoenix recently said at RubyKaigi that a weaker version of this benchmark is the standard that Ruby 3 should be aiming at.
Might the difference simply be test coverage?
-- The other Ruby implementations have been testing performance on those same synthetic benchmarks, and have already taken the opportunity to improve performance for those cases.
-- The other Ruby implementations have not been testing performance in other cases, and still have considerable opportunity to improve performance for those cases.
Would love to try it out if you did.
The JS equivalent of JRuby+Truffle is called Graal.js, and is available today from here http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oracle-labs/program-langua....
http://chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/cext/
People are now working on an LLVM bitcode interpreter instead, as this should support many languages not just C. There will be info about this at FOSDEM.
You could spend a whole bunch of time on this and actually not make an impact on people who actually use jruby in production
EDIT: now that I think of it, there's one extension that would be very useful - libgit2 + Rugged.
@chrisseaton is startup time similar to today's JRuby, i.e. slow? I feel like that's always been a bit of a sticking point for JRuby.
In addition to the steps we're taking, there's a sister project in Oracle Labs called the Substrate VM that would allow us to build a static binary with startup time on par with MRI. I can't speak to release plans or timelines on anything. I only mention it to show that startup time is a concern for us and we're thinking about how to fix it in a wide variety of ways.
You'd need to understand Java and Ruby, but we can help you with the rest.
Join us #jruby on Freenode IRC, or https://gitter.im/jruby/jruby.
