Eliminating GIL in Ruby Through Hardware Transactional Memory (2013) (opens in new tab)

Is it me or does anyone here thinks that with the recent progress in static compiled language in user-friendliness, the path of optimizing the ugly parts of dynamic languages outside of the language design itself is a waste of time ?

Note : not saying this research isn't interesting, because it may lead to many different uses. Just about the example chosen itself.

A more recent version of the work: http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_person_subp...

I saw the first author of this paper present this work in my building about six months ago. Myself and others were impressed with both their results, and the rigor in their analysis. They experiment on multiple hardware platforms, and even compare against other VMs. In short, this is what good systems research looks like.

Note that the page I linked to has both the full paper and the slides from their conference talk. I should also disclose that I also work for IBM Research, so I may have some bias in liking this paper.

(Copying a comment I made on an older submission; that may be why this poster submitted the older research report.)

...on a mainframe....

I summarized this paper in my blog if anyone wants a higher-level overview of what it means:

http://www.mikeperham.com/2013/12/31/rubys-gil-and-transacti...