Diggin’ and Fetchin’ with TruffleRuby — Development (2021)

Sometimes as a software developer you come across a seemingly innocuous piece of code that, when investigated, leads you down a rabbit hole much deeper than you anticipated. This is the story of such a case.It begins with some clever Ruby code that we want to refactor, and ends with a prototype solution that changes the language itself. Along the way, we unearth a performance issue in TruffleRuby, an implementation of the Ruby language, and with it, an opportunity to work at the compiler level to even off the performance cliff. I’ll share this story with you.