Because I was pressed for time yesterday, I ended my blog on Ruby VMs with a little teaser about other possibilities: “And there is still room for serious creativity there. I’ll write more about that soon.” About two hours later, Avi Bryant posted essentially the same thing I was going to say.

Avi has blogged before about the idea of implementing Ruby on an existing, fast Smalltalk VM (the object models of the two languages are very, very close; the biggest hurdle would be Ruby’s richer method argument handling).

But, as Avi points out, the open-source availability of Strongtalk, including the VM implementation, is a big development. Although it’s now ten-year-old technology, Strongtalk nevertheless represents the state of the art in dynamic language implementation. Strongtalks basic principles of operation have been widely known for years (although apparently not by Joel), but actual implementations of those ideas have all been in proprietary products. (The Hotspot source is available, but not as widely as a true open-source products.) For OSS developers who want to learn, the closest they could get to a cutting-edge dynamic language implementation has been Self. But although the techniques in Strongtalk originated in Self, the Strongtalk team took them a lot farther.

Sun’s HotSpot VM for Java already incorporates these techniques, so JRuby is already on track to take advantage of them. I don’t know that much about the CLR, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that it uses similar ideas, which bodes well for IronPython and an eventual Ruby implementation for the CLR. But there’s still a performance limitation imposed by the mismatch between object models, and the unavoidable mapping layer that implements one atop the other.

Mr. Malsky, I predict that in three years, Ruby will have performance rivaling Strongtalk’s—whether by someone adapting Strongtalk itself to run Ruby, or by mining it for techniques that can be rolled into YARV or some other VM project.

(Well, maybe three years is a bit optimistic. But I can hope.)