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Journeys of a not so young anymore Software Engineer
Personal blog · pragtob.wordpress.comprogrammingsystems
Journeys of a not so young anymore Software Engineer is a personal blog at pragtob.wordpress.com about programming and systems. Since 2012, 41 different Hacker News readers have linked it 55 times, most often “The Great Rubykon Benchmark 2020: CRuby vs. JRuby vs. TruffleRuby”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-04-12, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (19) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Benjamin Krause's posts on Ruby implementation benchmarks, such as the Rubykon benchmark and TruffleRuby versus JRuby and CRuby, and on the history of the waterfall model.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- Benchmarks comparing TruffleRuby, JRuby and Ruby described as very promising and great.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 19 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Software Engineering, Humans, Ruby, Elixir, the web
Most-linked posts?
- The Great Rubykon Benchmark 2020: CRuby vs. JRuby vs. TruffleRuby9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-08-24
- Benchmarking a Go AI in Ruby: CRuby vs. Rubinius vs. JRuby vs. Truffle7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2017-01-27
- Why Waterfall was a big misunderstanding from the beginning5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2015-05-08
- Benchmarking a Go AI in Ruby: CRuby vs. Rubinius vs. JRuby vs. Truffle/Graal3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-11-30
- Choosing Elixir for the Code, Not the Performance3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-07-26
- Careful what you measure: 2.1x slower to 4.2x faster – MJIT vs. TruffleRuby2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-08-30
- Introducing Benchee: simple and extensible benchmarking for Elixir2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-06-07
- Surprises with Nested Transactions, Rollbacks and ActiveRecord2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-12-12
- Tail Call Optimization in Elixir – not as efficient as you probably think2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-06-24
- Mastery comes from Failure2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-12-08
What Hacker News says?
Seems about right. Luckily, if performance becomes an issue, you can probably scale out horizontally, or perhaps if you don't care much about sticking to the reference implementations, you can consider using alternative ones. For example, there are benchmarks of some of the Ruby implementations here: https://pragtob.wordpress.com/2020/08/24/the-great-rubykon-b... And here's a paper from 2016 comparing some of the Py…
Comment linking /2020/08/24/the-great-rubykon-benchmark-2020-cruby-vs-jruby-vs-truffleruby/
on “Ruby 3.0”Submitted Elixir Gotchas as a story · 105 points
HN discussionGreat! Benchmarks of TruffleRuby vs JRuby vs Ruby looks very promising. edit: https://pragtob.wordpress.com/2017/01/24/benchmarking-a-go-a...
Comment linking /2017/01/24/benchmarking-a-go-ai-in-ruby-cruby-vs-rubinius-vs-jruby-vs-truffle-a-year-later/
on “GraalVM: Run Programs Faster Anywhere”Submitted Careful what you measure: 2.1x slower to 4.2x faster – MJIT vs. TruffleRuby as a story · 7 points
HN discussionIs it something you'd consider? Even if it's not a performance bottleneck right now it's probably worth it to reduce server costs (more efficient Ruby implementation = fewer servers required to run GitLab.com). Could be looking at serious gains, 3x over CRuby looks to be a fairly reasonable goal when using RubyTruffle (slow startup times can be mitigated against with SubstrateVM), and if that's not an option due to…
Comment linking /2015/11/30/benchmarking-a-go-ai-in-ruby-cruby-vs-rubinius-vs-jruby-vs-trufflegraal/
on “Our long term plan to make GitLab as fast as possible with Vue and Webpack”Submitted Choosing Elixir for the Code, Not the Performance as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThat is page one of the waterfall document, there are other pages though. https://pragtob.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/why-waterfall-was-a...
Comment linking /2012/03/02/why-waterfall-was-a-big-misunderstanding-from-the-beginning-reading-the-original-paper/
on “Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record”Submitted Elixir 1.3’s mix xref working its magic in a real world example as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI learned ruby on a big project about...5 years ago. I've been using it ever since at work and I definitely understand the pain points. With Ruby you really have to learn to understand and appreciate where its strengths are to be productive with it (how close it can bring you to Aspect Orient Programming is probably the biggest). The only similarity that Elixir honestly has with Ruby is clean syntax and general emph…
Comment linking /2017/07/26/choosing-elixir-for-the-code-not-the-performance/
on “Elixir in Depth – Reading and personal notes”Submitted Choosing Elixir for the Code, Not the Performance (2017) as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> Is it something to do with the extreme dynamic nature of the language? Smalltalk/SOM, JavaScript and Lua share the "extreme dynamic nature" but still have much faster JIT implementations. From my reports you can see that V8 (Node) is about ten times and LuaJIT about five times faster than MRI Ruby 3 JIT. Here are some other performance results using the same benchmark suite: https://github.com/smarr/are-we-fast-ye…
Comment linking /2020/08/24/the-great-rubykon-benchmark-2020-cruby-vs-jruby-vs-truffleruby/
on “Ruby 3.0.0 RC1”Submitted Benchmarking a Go AI in Ruby: CRuby vs. Rubinius vs. JRuby vs. Truffle as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIt appears that Ruby 3 might come short of their 3x speedup goal [1][2] ... has anyone tried out Graal/TruffleRuby? Graal/TruffleRuby has shown some massive perf increases [3] [1] https://pragtob.wordpress.com/2017/01/24/benchmarking-a-go-a... [2] https://pragtob.wordpress.com/2020/08/24/the-great-rubykon-b... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/b4c2lx/truffleruby_be...
Comment linking /2020/08/24/the-great-rubykon-benchmark-2020-cruby-vs-jruby-vs-truffleruby/
on “Ruby: We have decided to go forward to 3.0 this year”Submitted What does a staff engineer do? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFrom benchmarks [1], 2.8.0 (with jit) is ~2x faster than 2.0.0p648 [2]. [1]: https://pragtob.wordpress.com/2020/08/24/the-great-rubykon-b... [2]: https://pragtob.wordpress.com/2017/01/24/benchmarking-a-go-a...
Comment linking /2017/01/24/benchmarking-a-go-ai-in-ruby-cruby-vs-rubinius-vs-jruby-vs-truffle-a-year-later/
on “Ruby: We have decided to go forward to 3.0 this year”Submitted The Great Rubykon Benchmark 2020: CRuby vs. JRuby vs. TruffleRuby as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI expect a second wave is most likely to come if TruffleRuby takes off (perhaps when it has full support for Rails). https://pragtob.wordpress.com/2017/01/24/benchmarking-a-go-a...
Comment linking /2017/01/24/benchmarking-a-go-ai-in-ruby-cruby-vs-rubinius-vs-jruby-vs-truffle-a-year-later/
on “How is Ruby different in Japan?”Submitted Benchmarking MRI vs. Rubinius vs. JRuby vs. Truffleruby as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHe were are, mostly one developper in only a few years has managed to create ~the fastest R runtime thanks to the graalVM infrastructure https://github.com/oracle/fastr + it get polyglotism for free. See also graalphp: https://github.com/abertschi/graalphp/blob/master/results.md Oracle has managed to create a language framework that enable unprecedented performance and polyglotism but there are no human resources al…
Comment linking /2020/08/24/the-great-rubykon-benchmark-2020-cruby-vs-jruby-vs-truffleruby/
on “The Modern Java Platform – 2021 Edition”Submitted Mastery comes from Failure as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI don't think "Agile" is responsible, but it is a supporting character here for sure. Let me give a little history from my perspective. I got involved in that movement before the word "Agile" existed; I was really interested in the ideas coming from the Extreme Programming folks and had tried them out on a small project in 2000. All of the people I met early on really wanted to do software well; the question was how…
Comment linking /2012/03/02/why-waterfall-was-a-big-misunderstanding-from-the-beginning-reading-the-original-paper/
on “AEG combi microwave unusable after update: device thinks it is a steam oven”Submitted What did AlphaGo do to beat the strongest human Go player? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI agree that Ruby isn't a good fit for every context, but the reasons for Ruby's speed can and are being addressed, this article is extremely accessible and beautiful: http://chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/deoptimizing/ A few critical C extensions are missing (OpenSSL): https://github.com/graalvm/truffleruby A recent benchmark (FWIW): https://pragtob.wordpress.com/2017/01/24/benchmarking-a-go-a...
Comment linking /2017/01/24/benchmarking-a-go-ai-in-ruby-cruby-vs-rubinius-vs-jruby-vs-truffle-a-year-later/
on “Oj – Optimized JSON in Ruby”Submitted Benchmarking a Go AI in Ruby: CRuby vs. Rubinius vs. JRuby vs. Truffle/Graal as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> You realize this person that you are calling an expert I didn't claim he's an expert, but he did write TruffleRuby, which is still about twice as fast as any other implementation of Ruby six years later: https://pragtob.wordpress.com/2020/08/24/the-great-rubykon-b... . So I think it's safe to say that he's at least minimally competent at performance engineering :) > I'm not really sure how anything I'm saying is e…
Comment linking /2020/08/24/the-great-rubykon-benchmark-2020-cruby-vs-jruby-vs-truffleruby/
on “Drop millions of allocations by using a linked list (2015)”Submitted Rewrite of Shoes 4 - a Ruby DSL for creating GUIs as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWhat is less known is that the author of the waterfall model Winston W. Royce recommended doing the entire process TWICE: https://pragtob.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/why-waterfall-was-a... It is hard to foresee how the world of development would look like today, had companies used the waterfall process twice on each project.
Comment linking /2012/03/02/why-waterfall-was-a-big-misunderstanding-from-the-beginning-reading-the-original-paper/
on “The Waterfall Model was a straw man argument from the beginning (2015)”Submitted The Great Rubykon Benchmark 2020: CRuby vs. JRuby vs. TruffleRuby as a story · 2 points
HN discussionRuby doesn't have to be slow anymore! https://pragtob.wordpress.com/2020/08/24/the-great-rubykon-b... https://speakerdeck.com/eregon/running-rack-and-rails-faster...
Comment linking /2020/08/24/the-great-rubykon-benchmark-2020-cruby-vs-jruby-vs-truffleruby/
on “Static Typing for Ruby: Adopting Sorbet at Scale”Submitted Revisiting “Tail Call Optimization in Elixir and Erlang” with Benchee 1.0 as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
