Ruby is now ludicrously fast.
Ludicrious JIT is a Ruby 1.8 JIT which uses the libjit library that was written for dotgnu pnet's JIT core, very similar to what rubydium was trying to do. But libjit's come a long way in the last 3 (!) years, so if you're a Ruboi I suggest you try this out anyway.
It is a testament to the efforts of Rhys, Aleskey and Klaus to keep the library truly modular, reusable and independent of pnet's internals.
--The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't reuse time.
-- Merrick Furst
So it has finally happened - a stable release of dotgnu's Portable.NET and Libjit, after nearly a year and a bit more. The critical thing about this release is that Rhys doesn't yet know about this yet. This is the first release we've done without rhysw's involvement - he's been last sighted in Greephone land. So rather than the usual place, you can get the packages from the savannah download area.
This is by far the most revolutionary release dotgnu has had. The entire x86 engine is now fully native JITted. The windows.forms has taken quite a lot of work. My special congratulations to Aleksey Demakov and Klaus Triechel - who have worked especially hard of late to get libJIT into the shape it is today.
And in other news, we've put up a couple of Google SoC ideas at gnu.org. I'm very much interested in people picking up the AMD64/ARMv4 libjit core, either individually or as a team (does GOOG allow that ?). Also great strides being made in WinForms land, Radek has just managed to get the SharpDevelop editor to run.
The SD code uses a fair bit of PInvoke code bits to draw the caret and such, which is totally disabled in this rebuild. But it is quite an achievement at this point to be able to run a GUI component of this complexity.
Awesome work all around folks !
--Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.
-- Theophrastus
Tom Tromey has put up information about a function GCJ backend interpreter using libjit. He's not put up the code as such, but here's the blog entry explaining what he's done. But a little digging found me this gcj-jit/jit.cc which could be the Real McCoy.
This is all really awesome for libjit because it adds another good use as well as a lot more test cases. More news later.
--Your motives for doing whatever good deed you may have in mind will be misinterpreted by somebody.
Actually, it happened before 2006 dawned. I was too busy to sit down and write about it. But it is official folks, the first peice of C# code has been run using the libjit x86 JIT. Here is the announcement.
If you would like to help out dotgnu - by talking about it, by testing it - any way you can, contact me (t3rmin4t0r on #dotgnu!irc.freenode.net). I really need someone who can fix up the XML parts of dotgnu. So if you want to help, be sure to talk me to me. Or talk to _Simon, he'll probably tell you what all bugs that I am slacking on.
--All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
-- J.S Bach