Stefan Marr

Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer)
and Royal Society Industry Fellow

Stefan Marr I am working at the School of Computing at the University of Kent. My work focuses on programming language implementation techniques, complex concurrent systems, and tooling.

Much of work revolves around making interpreters faster, detecting and preventing concurrency bugs at run time, and use modern language runtime systems to provide programmers with better tooling.

For contact details see my page at the School of Computing.

Archive of posts with the tag Ruby

Jun 6, 2023: Squeezing a Little More Performance Out of Bytecode Interpreters
Nov 8, 2022: How Effective are Classic Lookup Optimizations for Rails Apps?

We know that Ruby and especially Rails applications can be very dynamic and pretty large. Though, many of the optimizations interpreters and even just-in-time compilers use have been invented in the 1980s and 1990s before Ruby and Rails even existed. So, I was wondering: do these optimizations still have a chance of coping with the millions of lines of Ruby code that large Rails apps from Shopify, Stripe, or GitLab have? Unfortunately, we don’t have access to such applications. As the next best thing, we took the largest Ruby benchmarks we could get our hands on, and analyzed those.
Dec 30, 2020: The Shape of 6M Lines of Ruby

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.