Today I’ve downloaded YARV and played with it a little. YARV is a Ruby Virtual Machine and is destined to be integrated with Ruby 2.0. I’m running on a Apple Powerbook G4 (PowerPC) and got it compiled and running. It’s a good increase in speed for most things.

-- benchmark summary ---------------------------
app_answer      5.701   0.496
app_factorial   0.103   1.835
app_fib 42.421  6.518
app_mandelbrot  13.232  5.405
app_pentomino   640.962 625.845
app_raise       5.326   5.989
app_strconcat   4.894   3.675
app_tak 25.738  4.446
app_tarai       20.457  3.499
loop_times      17.536  10.263
loop_whileloop  28.237  4.112
loop_whileloop2 5.695   0.843
so_ackermann    7.394   3.809
so_array        19.818  6.986
so_concatenate  5.857   2.526
so_count_words  1.259   1.181
so_exception    9.392   8.251
so_lists        3.415   2.198
so_matrix       5.880   2.392
so_nested_loop  17.801  7.685
so_object       18.156  14.321
so_random       6.230   1.827
so_sieve        1.838   0.417
vm1_block       70.954  10.785
vm1_const       48.059  6.319
vm1_ensure      48.379  4.138
vm1_length      52.615  7.440
vm1_rescue      37.834  5.011
vm1_simplereturn        51.808  8.528
vm1_swap        69.424  6.104
vm2_array       17.871  7.805
vm2_method      35.250  7.927
vm2_poly_method 45.959  10.135
vm2_poly_method_ov      12.094  1.893
vm2_proc        24.406  5.704
vm2_regexp      14.121  7.003
vm2_send        14.200  5.153
vm2_super       16.208  3.202
vm2_unif1       13.023  2.243
vm2_zsuper      17.653  3.435
vm3_thread_create_join  0.064   0.365