I’m very happy to announce that today there is a new backend in JRuby, based on two new JVM technologies being researched by Oracle Labs. It’s called the Truffle backend as it uses a framework for implementing languages called Truffle, and is designed to work with a new JVM JIT compiler called Graal. Documentation linked below gives the technical details and pointers to more information, but in general the goal is that the Truffle backend is significantly faster and simpler than the current backends as it uses a more expressive interface to the JVM than is possible by emitting bytecode.
We’ve been talking to Charlie Nutter and Thomas Enebo about this work for some time now, and we’re creating this new branch after they’ve told us that it’s welcome in the repository. The code is in a branch called ‘truffle’ - https://github.com/jruby/jruby/tree/truffle. There is a blog post with more general background information at http://blog.jruby.org/2014/01/truffle_graal_high_performance_backend/, and there is a wiki page with some details of how to get started with the code at https://github.com/jruby/jruby/wiki/Truffle. I’m Chris Seaton - I work for Oracle Labs part-time alongside my PhD at the University of Manchester in the UK. I’m now going to be working on the Truffle backend within JRuby, so you can consider me a new paid contributor to JRuby! I hope to be a valuable member of the community, so please feel more than free to get in touch with me. Chris @ChrisGSeaton ch...@chrisseaton.com http://www.chrisseaton.com/
