[MacRuby-devel] Running the experimental branch

[Vincent Isambart]

> In the comments of Charlie's latest blog post, someone showed their
> benchmarks of the 0.5 branch running
> tak(). http://blog.headius.com/2009/04/how-jruby-makes-ruby-fast.html#comments
> I'd like to do the same but rake isn't giving me a macruby executable. How
> do I go beyond miniruby and get a ruby capable of running
> Charlie's bench_tak.rb?

You can't get a macruby executable with the current experimental
branch. And anyway you can run the tak benchmark with only miniruby
(./miniruby -I./lib bench_tak.rb 5)

But anyway it seems no one seems to see the only interesting point of
Charles' posts: mini benchmarks are not a good indicator of the speed
of an implementation. I've never seen any real-life Ruby code that
does heavy computations and recursion like tak or fibonacci...
Such mini-benchmarks are mainly a tool for the implementers themselves
to see if some code modification did something good in an area, but
they generally do not mirror real speed...

And for real speed the new MacRuby VM is still young - it does not
even run IRB yet anyway (well I would not be surprised if it does next
week) - and lots of optimization are still to be done. Fixnum
computations however is already well optimized and is probably not an
area where you're going to see many changes in speed.