RUG::B

For the past two years I've been studying compilers and virtual machines, developing some simple compilers in Ruby, programming languages on the Rubinius VM, and working on my own language-agnostic virtual machine, the Terror VM.

This talk will cover what I've learned during this enlightening process, how a Virtual Machine works, and most importantly why you (as a Ruby programmer) should care about it. I'll also guide the audience through the implementation of a very simple VM in Ruby, to show that there are less dragons than you might think.

How often do you have to leave your comfort zone? How often does it happen that you need to change the fundamentals of your application?

Well… it has happened to my team recently. We had to abandon our way of thinking about Ruby on Rails applications. Single-threaded servers were not a choice anymore, neither was JRuby nor Event Machine. And we had to handle up to 200k requests per minute.

This talk is a case study about how, step by step, we got to multi threaded RoR application with MRI 1.9, MySQL, DataMapper. We want to present how we came to the solution, what did we have to do to make our application thread safe, how did we manage to use threads in MRI and what we learned while working on the big feature, that made us change the fundamentals of our application.

MagLev - The Ruby implemention with builtin object persistence. We will talk about persistence concepts in MagLev, Rails support and about exploring object and debugging Rails applications with the MagLev Database Explorer.