Shopify is continuing to invest on Ruby on Rails at scale. We’ve taken that further recently by funding high-profile academics to focus their work towards Ruby and the needs of the Ruby community. Over the past year we have given nearly half a million dollars in gifts to influential researchers that we trust to make a significant impact on the Ruby community for the long term.

Shopify engineers and researchers at a recent meetup in London

We want developments in programming languages and their implementations to be explored in Ruby, so that support for Ruby's unique properties are built in from the start. For example, Ruby's prevalent metaprogramming motivated a whole new kind of inline caching to be developed and presented as a paper at one of the top programming language conferences, and Ruby's unusually loose C extension API motivated a new kind of C interpreter to run virtualized C. These innovations wouldn't have happened if academics weren't looking at Ruby.

We want programming language research to be evaluated against the workloads that matter to companies using Ruby. We want researchers to understand the scale of our code bases, how frequently they're deployed, and the code patterns we use in them. For example, a lot of VM research over the last couple of decades has traded off a long warmup optimization period for better peak performance, but this doesn't work for companies like Shopify where we're redeploying very frequently. Researchers aren't aware of these kinds of problems unless we partner with them and guide them.

We think that working with academics like this will be self-perpetuating. With key researchers thinking and talking about Ruby, more early career researchers will consider working with Ruby and solving problems that are important to the Ruby community.

Let’s meet Shopify’s new research collaborators.

Professor Laurence Tratt

Professor Laurence Tratt describes his vision for optimizing Ruby

Professor Laurence Tratt is the Shopify and Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Language Engineering at King’s College London. Jointly funded by Shopify, the Royal Academy, and King’s College, Laurie is looking at the possibility of automatically generating a just-in-time compiler from the existing Ruby interpreter through hardware meta-tracing and basic-block stitching.

Laurie has an eclectic and influential research portfolio, and extensive writing on many aspects of improving dynamic languages and programming. He has context from the Python community and the groundbreaking work towards meta-tracing in the PyPy project. Laurie also works to build the programming language implementation community for the long term by co-organising a summer school series for early career researchers, bringing them together with experienced researchers from academia and industry.

Professor Steve Blackburn

Professor Steve Blackburn is building a new model for applied garbage collection

Professor Steve Blackburn is an academic at the Australian National University and Google Research. Shopify funded his group’s work on MMTk, the memory management toolkit, a general library for garbage collection that brings together proven garbage collection algorithms with a framework for research into new ideas for garbage collection. We’re putting MMTk into Ruby so that Ruby can get the best current collectors today and future garbage collectors can be tested against Ruby.

Steve is a world-leading expert in garbage collection, and Shopify’s funding is putting Ruby’s unique requirements for memory management into his focus.

Dr Stefan Marr

Dr Stefan Marr is an expert in benchmarking dynamic language implementations

Dr Stefan Marr is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Kent in the UK and a Royal Society Industrial Fellow. With the support of Shopify, he’s examining how we can make interpreters faster and improve interpreter startup and warmup time.

Stefan has a distinguished reputation for benchmarking techniques, differential analysis between languages and implementation techniques, and dynamic language implementation. He co-invented a new method for inline caching that has been instrumental for improving the performance of Ruby’s metaprogramming in TruffleRuby.

Shopify engineers and research collaborators discuss how to work together to improve Ruby

We’ve been bringing together the researchers that we’re funding with our senior Ruby community engineers to share their knowledge of what’s already possible and what could be possible, combining our understanding of how Ruby and Rails are used at scale today and what the community needs.

These external researchers are all in addition to our own internal teams doing publishable research-level work on Ruby, with YJIT and TruffleRuby, and more efforts.

Part of Shopify’s Ruby and Rails Infrastructure Team listening to research proposals

We’ll be looking forward to sharing more about our investments in Ruby research over the coming years in blog posts and academic papers.

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