Optimisation of Method Calls in Matz’s Ruby Interpreter

Jan Jakub Stępień

Abstract

Ruby is a dynamically typed object-oriented programming language. Despite various existing implementations of the language, the efficiency of the execution of the canoni cal virtual machine is still lacking. ‘The aim of this thesis is to increase the efficiency of aforementioned virtual machine. ‘Through a performance analysis of two implementations of the language—MRI and Rubinius—I propose three optimizations based on the acquired results. ‘These optimizations are focused in the area of methods’ invocations and are based on a two-phase approach. Firstly, a preliminary execution of processed Ruby code is per formed in order to gather information about types of objects whose methods were called. Secondly, ihe code is executed by a modified virtual machine which takes advantage of collected data in order to reduce costs of methods’ invocations. Proposed optimisations were applied to MM and their effectiveness was evaluated with a suite of benchmarks. Results show that introduced changes do not have a significant effect on MM’s perfor mance, however in certain cases an improvement of up to io% was achieved.