An Overview of Spinel, Matz's AOT Ruby Compiler

Spinel compiles Ruby source code into standalone native executables. It performs whole-program type inference and generates optimized C code, achieving significant speedups over CRuby. Spinel is self-hosting: the compiler backend is written in Ruby and compiles itself into a native binary. As a Rubyist who remembers the era when Ruby was slumped near the bottom of the benchmarks, this is obviously exciting. I’ll get more into its history later, but a few points to keep in mind: it’s an experiment/research it only supports a subset of Ruby (no Rails apps anytime soon/ever!) it’s not a successor to CRuby In technical terms, it’s an ahead-of-time (AOT) compiler that turns Ruby source into a standalone native binary (by way of C) depending only on libc (the C library) and libm (maths library).