Laurent Sansonetti

RubyMotion is a toolchain that lets Ruby developers write iOS and Android apps. Internally RubyMotion features 2 distinct implementations of the Ruby language (one for the Objective-C runtime and one for the JVM) as well as a static compiler written with LLVM. In this presentation, we will dig inside RubyMotion and see how everything works, from unified runtimes to static and dynamic (JIT) compilation strategies.

This presentation will focus on RubyMotion internals. It will not cover iOS or Android development. It will not focus on Ruby as a development language as well.

We will start by introducing RubyMotion then explain how it works. We will do quick overviews of the 2 Ruby runtimes included in RubyMotion, which are full implementations of Ruby, and explain design and implementation decisions.

Following up, we will explain how RubyMotion apps are statically compiled into machine code. We will have a look inside the RubyMotion compiler, written in LLVM, and we will explain how a dynamic language such as Ruby gets compiled statically. We will look at a few optimization passes.

Finally, if we have time, we will show up a few exciting use cases of the LLVM JIT, used to implement the REPL (irb) in RubyMotion.

RubyMotion is a commercial implementation of the Ruby language for iOS and OS X development. RubyMotion makes intensive use of LLVM in order to statically compile Ruby. In this session we will focus on how RubyMotion uses LLVM also a bit of history with the MacRuby project (which uses LLVM as a JIT).

RubyMotion is a commercial implementation of the Ruby language for iOS and OS X development. The RubyMotion toolchain lets Ruby developers write full-fledged native applications for iPhone, iPad and the Mac. RubyMotion apps are statically compiled into optimized machine code.

RubyMotion makes intensive use of LLVM in order to statically compile Ruby and target various architectures. In this session we will focus on how RubyMotion uses LLVM, the challenges that we had to solve in order to compile Ruby, some of the various codegen optimizations we implemented and how we integrate with profiling/debugging tools. We will also cover the mistakes we learned from the MacRuby project, which uses LLVM a bit differently.

(This presentation will only focus on the internals of RubyMotion. We will not cover Ruby, RubyMotion or iOS/OS X development.)