The Digital Press

Shopify and the Australian National University are collaborating to integrate the Memory Management Toolkit (MMTk) with Ruby, aiming to build a next-generation garbage collector that improves performance significantly.

Why it matters: MMTk offers sophisticated, parallel garbage collection algorithms that could greatly speed up Ruby applications.

The big picture: MMTk supports modular, VM-neutral GC development, enabling future innovations and performance gains across languages.

The stakes: Parallel GC faces challenges like slower finalization due to malloc scalability limits, requiring new allocation strategies.

Commenters say: Many are impressed by MMTk's parallelism potential and eager for Ruby performance improvements, noting the complexity of GC integration.