YARV

Infobox Software
name = YARV



caption =
developer = Koichi Sasada
latest release version =
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latest preview version =
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operating system =
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genre = Ruby Virtual Machine
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website = http://www.atdot.net/yarv/

YARV is a bytecode interpreter that was developed for the Ruby programming language by Koichi Sasada. The name is an acronym for "Yet another Ruby VM". The goal of the project was to greatly reduce the execution time of Ruby programs.

Performance

Benchmarks by rubychan.de showed significant increases in performance. [ [http://www.rubychan.de/share/yarv_speedups.html Benchmarks: Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9] (rubychan.de)] Benchmarks by Antonio Cangiano showed an an average four times speed improvement over the existing interpreter [cite web
url=http://antoniocangiano.com/2007/12/03/the-great-ruby-shootout/
title=The Great Ruby Shootout
date=2007-03-12
last=Cangiano|first=Antonio
accessdate=2008-02-01] . Both evaluations comprised a mix of mostly synthetic benchmarks.

Ruby on Rails was reported to run about 15% faster with YARV compared to Ruby 1.8.6 [cite web
url=http://eigenclass.org/hiki/non-synthetic-benchmarks-for-yarv
title=Rails on 1.9: first benchmarks, YARV exposed to non-synthetic tests
quote="When benchmarking basic requests with a minimalistic schema (only one int column), even though YARV serviced requests 15% faster, it took much longer to load the environment (50% slower). This comes as no surprise since plain old (evil) eval is slower in YARV(...)In fact, the mere fact of requiring active_record (and indirectly ActiveSupport) causes a sharp decrease in performance."
publisher=eigenclass.org
date=2007-03-28
accessdate=2008-09-13] . However, startup time and ActiveRecord use are still slower.

History

On January 1, 2007, YARV was merged into the Ruby Subversion repository. [http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/the_ruby_vm_episode_i The Ruby VM: Episode I] - "Shades of Gray"]

Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto fully merged YARV into the Ruby 1.9.0 version which was released December 26, 2007. [http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/284720 merge YARV] announcement by Koichi Sasada] From this point onwards YARV became the official Ruby interpreter, replacing the one developed by Matsumoto.

ee also

* Parrot virtual machine
* Ruby

References

External links

* [http://www.atdot.net/yarv/ YARV home page] Note: obsolete now that YARV is merged into Ruby
* [http://www.atdot.net/yarv/rc2006_sasada_yarv_on_rails.pdf YARV: Yet Another RubyVM ... on Rails?] - Koichi Sasada's RubyConf 2006 presentation
* [http://antoniocangiano.com/2007/12/03/the-great-ruby-shootout/ The Great Ruby Shootout (updated)] - Ruby 1.9.0(YARV) versus other Ruby VMs (Ruby 1.8.6, JRuby, XRuby, and Rubinius)]
* [http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=yarv&lang2=ruby YARV in The Computer Language Benchmarks Game] - Ruby 1.9.0(YARV) versus Ruby 1.8.6