The Future Shape of Ruby Objects

These are the notes for a talk I gave at RubyKaigi 2021, which is why they’re written as if we were talking and going through some slides and code together.Hello I’m Chris Seaton. I’m a Senior Staff Engineer at Shopify where I’m working on Ruby performance. I’m the founder of TruffleRuby, which is a very highly optimizing implementation of Ruby. I also maintain The Ruby Bibliography at rubybib.org that documents research on Ruby.Today I want to share some existing ideas that TruffleRuby uses for how to implement objects in Ruby, that we think could be applied in MRI or other implementations of Ruby. We’ll explain where these ideas have come from and what their history is. We’ll describe how they work in a high-level way, and then we’ll show how TruffleRuby implements them and what it’s able to achieve, and how MRI could do the same things.