Faster Ruby: Thoughts from the Outside — Matthew Gaudet

As someone who comes from a compiler background, when asked to make a language fast, I’m sympathetic to the reaction: “Just throw a compiler at it!”. However, working on SpiderMonkey, I’ve come to the conclusion that a fast language implementation has many moving parts, and a compiler is just one part of it.I’m going to get to Ruby, but before I get there, I want to take a tour briefly of some bits and pieces of SpiderMonkey that help make it a fast JavaScript engine.