zig-ruby

What’s this?

This repo contains an experiment of building a Ruby extension with Zig programming language. It implements a slightly altered version of 100 doors from Rosetta Code.

These are results of benchmarks on my machine (Thinkpad T14):

Warming up --------------------------------------
                Ruby   924.000  i/100ms
                 Zig    13.885k i/100ms
Calculating -------------------------------------
                Ruby     12.745k (±22.1%) i/s -     60.984k in   5.052486s
                 Zig    233.096k (± 0.1%) i/s -      1.166M in   5.003698s

Comparison:
                 Zig:   233095.9 i/s
                Ruby:    12744.7 i/s - 18.29x  (± 0.00) slower

However, if you edit extconf.rb to use -Drelease-fast flag, the difference is much bigger:

Warming up --------------------------------------
                Ruby     1.020k i/100ms
                 Zig   171.828k i/100ms
Calculating -------------------------------------
                Ruby     10.289k (± 2.2%) i/s -     52.020k in   5.058112s
                 Zig      2.833M (± 6.3%) i/s -     14.262M in   5.059011s

Comparison:
                 Zig:  2833045.1 i/s
                Ruby:    10289.0 i/s - 275.35x  (± 0.00) slower

Please note that this is only one benchmark, not much science behind it. It doesn’t mean you will always get 270x speed boost on just rewriting in Zig.

How to run it

1. You need fairly recent version of Zig, which at this time means a version built from git
2. Clone this repo
3. Run rake benchmark

Note that it likely only works on Linux, I’d gladly