Charlie Gracie

I will be discussing recent work by my team to use the Eclipse OMR JitBuilder technology to improve the Lua interpreter performance. I will show the small changes required in the runtime to take advantage of the OMR JitBuilder technology, show the performance improvements and discuss the trade offs of using a JIT.

The Eclipse OMR project consists of a highly integrated set of open source C and C++ components that can be used to build robust language runtimes that will support many different hardware and operating system platforms. The talk will be focused mainly on the Compiler technology and specifically the JitBuilder and how it could be used by the Lua runtime. You can read more about the Eclipse OMR project at https://www.eclipse.org/omr/ and view the code at https://github.com/eclipse/omr. I will make a version of the Lua runtime source code with our changes available so everyone can look through and ask questions or provide feedback.

For years IBM has developed an independent implementation of the Java Virtual Machine which helped foster rapid improvements in the Java ecosystem. Recently, IBM has open sourced language agnostic components such as IBM's JIT and GC technologies as part of the Eclipse OMR project. IBM is actively working to open source the rest of the J9 Java VM as the Open J9 project. I will discuss the different components of the Open J9 VM at a high level and our plans for creating the open source project.

Every language community implements many of the same core components like garbage collection, just-in-time compilation, threading, tooling support, etc. Wouldn't it be great if there was an open source community making these technologies available to be used in all languages? This is exactly the goal of the OMR project: an open source project with reusable runtime technologies originating from the IBM J9 JVM representing hundreds of developer years of investment.

This talk describes a set of experiments conducted by IBM to test the use of several OMR technologies within the Ruby MRI runtime: GC, JIT, method profiling, and more. All this while still running real Ruby applications, including Rails. The talk will include the results from our experiments and ideas about the future of Ruby and OMR.