Shopify Invests in Research for Ruby at Scale (2022)

We want developments in programming languages and their implementations to be explored in Ruby, so that support for Ruby's unique properties are built in from the start. For example, Ruby's prevalent metaprogramming motivated a whole new kind of inline caching to be developed and presented as a paper at one of the top programming language conferences, and Ruby's unusually loose C extension API motivated a new kind of C interpreter to run virtualized C. These innovations wouldn't have happened if academics weren't looking at Ruby.We want programming language research to be evaluated against the workloads that matter to companies using Ruby. We want researchers to understand the scale of our code bases, how frequently they're deployed, and the code patterns we use in them. For example, a lot of VM research over the last couple of decades has traded off a long warmup optimization period for better peak performance, but this doesn't work for companies like Shopify where we're redeploying very frequently. Researchers aren't aware of these kinds of problems unless we partner with them and guide them.