Great logo :)
Scaling (or the lack of it) is one of the most commonly cited potential issues with Ruby (and hence with Ruby on Rails, which has otherwise gained a huge amount of traction in the industry as a rapid web app development framework).
So this news about MagLev, a new Ruby VM that's supposed to be very fast, is of definite interest.
Saw this news on Antonio Cangiano's blog.
It's a new Ruby VM from Gemstone, an enterprise software company that has been around for a while and already has some other enterprise products.
The Gemstone executive team seems to have a good background.
Obie Fernandez, a well-known Ruby developer, thinks its big news. Here's what he has to say about it.
The speed improvements mentioned for MagLev over the standard Ruby interpreter, MRI (Matz's Ruby Interpreter) are claimed to be of the order of 8x to 60x.
It has "an object persistence model that can hold up to 17 Petabytes (17 Million Gigabytes)" of data.
An interesting point about it, is that it may bypass the relational model and hence the well-known object-relational impedance mismatch, to overcome which, ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) software such as ActiveRecord (used in Ruby on Rails) and many others have been developed, for various languages.
Which would also mean, probably, no SQL can be used. Instead you'd probably have to use their proprietary object-persistence API's that can let you read and write data between memory and persistent storage.
A couple of potential cons, at least as of now:
- MagLev's implementation of the Ruby language is not complete, as per Antonio's post.
- It's not going to be either fully open source (though parts of it might be), or free (except maybe in a limited version).
- Another point some bloggers have mentioned that using it would mean dependence on a single vendor, Gemstone.
Whatever the case may be, it should be interesting to see how it turns out, and whether MagLev gains industry adoption.
Vasudev Ram