Back in July 2020, I joined the Ruby & Rails Infrastructure (R&RI) team at Shopify. Our team focuses on making sure that Ruby as well as Ruby on Rails, central to the infrastructure behind all Shopify stores and much of the modern web, run as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
As part of the R&RI team, I got to meet skilled engineers that were doing open source work, directly contributing patches to CRuby itself. Since my background is in compiler design, I started to discuss with my manager the possibility that we could build a relatively simple Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler for Ruby. To my surprise, my manager and two colleagues were immediately on board with this idea, and what would become the YJIT project was born.
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