[MacRuby-devel] Running the experimental branch

[Richard Kilmer]

On Apr 4, 2009, at 8:18 PM, Vincent Isambart wrote:

>> 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)

To build what you can with experimental (miniruby) you should read the
README file which shows how to build/install LLVM and then build macruby

In there is says (after LLVM) to just do:

rake

To build.  What you should instead do is:

rake miniruby

This will build miniruby.  miniruby can be executed with:

,/miniruby -e 'p 1234'

miniruby behaves like the ruby executable itself.  You should be able to
run tak.rb then.

>
> 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

I don't necessarily agree that microbenchmarks are _NOT_ good  
indicators.
I think a specific microbenchmark is not, but the point of these micro-
benchmarks are to judge the speed of specific runtime units.  If you run
one really fast it is not a good indicator of general performance, but  
if you
run all of them quickly, its a good indication that the general  
performance
will exceed the performance of the runtimes you are comparing yourself
to.

> 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.
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