Social-distancing edition

Thursday 16th April 6:30pm Online

This month we’re going into social-distancing mode and operating NWRUG fully online. We’ll be using Zoom to broadcast the event so we can all attend from the comfort and safety of our own homes.

For our first fully-online NWRUG we have Chris Seaton giving us a deep dive into a useful technique for optimising a highly-dynamic language like Ruby. Warning: there may C code…

 Low Overhead Polling For Ruby

How does Ruby know if one of your threads has been ‘interrupted’? The MRI team were looking into ways to make this better a couple of years ago, so I looked into how it’s done in other high-performance language implementations and how MRI could use the same techniques. It turns out it could be useful for highly optimising other parts of Ruby as well.

Learning about this can teach you some more about the Ruby language, how it’s optimised, and how languages work at the machine-level, but all you should need to know to get something out of it is knowing a bit about Ruby.

About the speaker

Chris is a Senior Staff Engineer at Shopify, where he works on the Ruby programming Language, and a Visitor at the University of Manchester.

He was formerly a Research Manager at the Oracle Labs Virtual Machine Research Group, where he led the TruffleRuby implementation of Ruby. He also wrote a PhD in specialising dynamic techniques for implementing the Ruby programming language.

Register to attend

If you’d like to attend, you must register here. We’ll send out the meeting details on the day, but in the meantime make sure you are set up and ready to go by downloading and installing the Zoom client. If you don’t want to install the Zoom client there is a web client but it’s not as fully featured and you’ll still need to sign in with a Zoom account to use it.

As with our in-person events, our code of conduct applies to all attendees so make sure you are familiar with it.