One of the hard problems in language implementation research is benchmarking. Some people argue, we should benchmark only applications that actually matter to people. Though, this has various issues. Often, such applications are embedded in larger systems, and it’s hard to isolate the relevant parts. In many cases, these applications can also not be made available to other researchers. And, of course, things change over time, which means maintaining projects like DaCapo, Renaissance, or Jet Stream is a huge effort.
Following up on my last blog post, I am going to look at how Ruby is used to get a bit of an impression of whether there are major differences between Ruby and Smalltalk in their usage.
Recently, I was wondering how large code bases look like when it comes to the basic properties compiler might care about. And here I am not thinking about dynamic properties, but simply static properties such as length of methods, number of methods per class, number of fields, and so on.