How the Ruby Runtime Works with Aaron Patterson

Aaron is on both the ruby and rails core teams. He's best known for making puns, teaching others, and his contributions to the internals of ruby. Lately he's been focusing on a compacting garbage collector for ruby.This episode originally aired on Software Engineering Radio.Timestamps:00:40 - What Aaron likes about Ruby04:43 - Interpreted vs Compiled07:00 - Why the ruby interpreter is written in C11:00 - Other good languages to write virtual machines?15:20 - Moving from an Interpreter (MRI) to Virtual Machine (YARV)18:50 - Why there's no manual compilation step in Ruby23:28 - Why compile to bytecode instead of directly to machine code?26:34 - Stack based vs Register based VM28:00 - Differences between Core and Standard Library29:46 - Do you program more in ruby or C as a member of the ruby/rails core teams?30:30 - The Global Interpreter Lock (GIL / GVL)37:40 - Concurrency options in Ruby45:55 - Just in Time Compilation49:29 - Evolution of Garbage Collection in Ruby53:40 - Compacting Garbage Collection61:40 - Building a Compacting Garbage Collector without breaking C Extensions65:20 - Ruby's future, resources for learningLinks:Blog@tenderloveRuby Under a Microscope