Book Review: Ruby Under A Microscope

 

 

 Ruby Under A Microscope

 

Author: Pat Shaughnessy

During the past few weeks I've been reading this book, 'Ruby Under A Microscope' by Pat Shaughnessy which covers internals of virtual machine used by different implementations of Ruby programming language. I would consider myself lucky to have an opportunity to review this book under the Oreilly's blogger review program as this is a must-read for any Ruby developer and specifically to someone doing a Ruby vs Java comparison. While the virtual machine internals and algorithms used are widely discussed and known in Java, the same cannot be said for Ruby and Ruby developers generally shrug it off when confronted with interpreter/platform specific issues and seek refuge with changing/scaling up resources.
Detailing of internals help in understanding the behavior of the language as the optimizations made internally by the compiler have a direct bearing on the behavior of the program and can exhibit unexpected behavior. What is of peculiar interest here is that this book delves into the internals down to the compiler in order to understand the resultant behavior/performance.
The book starts with the tokenizing and parser mechanism preset in ruby and continues to the compilation of interpreted script into YARV instructions. This is then explained in next chapter where the program call stack and variables used internally is detailed.

Control branching and method dispatch are discussed before the discussion moves into Class, Object and Method mechanism. The hash mechanism used to save objects by ruby is detailed next before blocks are discussed and Lambda and Procs are discussed together with Stack vs Heap memory. This is followed with advice which is worth reading for those not familiar with metaprogramming ruby and while this is not as verbose as 'Metaprogramming Ruby', it does a good job explaining various reflection based constructs.
After covering the language internals, two of the leading platforms, JRuby and Rubinius are detailed and compared against MRI(YARV). Lastly Garbage collection is discussed and comparison between ruby and java garbage collectors is discussed. Pat really does well in explaining the differences and also provides ideas to explore things based on the GC profile report here. I'd also advise to check out his blog for more such topics.

I'd heartily recommend this book to anyone who is interested - from students to expert pros alike as anyone coding/using Ruby ought to know its internals and have more confidence in developing and using this platform for non-trivial tasks.
Disclaimer: This book has been provided me by OReilly under their Blogger Review program.