Announcing Topaz: A New Ruby¶

Posted: February 6, 2013

I’m extraordinarily pleased to today announce Topaz, a project I started 10 months ago, to create a brand new implementation of the Ruby programming language (version 1.9.3).

Topaz is written in Python on top of the RPython translation toolchain (the same one that powers PyPy). Its primary goals are simplicity and performance.

Because Topaz builds on RPython, and thus much of the fantastic work of the PyPy developers, it comes out of the box with a high performance garbage collector, and a state of the art JIT (just-in-time) compiler. What does this mean? Out of the box Topaz is extremely fast.

Topaz is far from complete and is missing many builtin methods and classes. However, it does have nearly every element of Ruby, including classes, blocks, many builtin types, all sorts of method calls, and much much more. We don’t yet consider it stable, but it’s getting closer every day.

If you want to try it out right now, you can grab a nightly build, or build it yourself:

The major goal for the next several months is going to be completeness: adding more features of Ruby, more builtin classes, more standard library modules, and generally getting to a point where real people can run real applications under Topaz (the holy grail, of course, being running Rails). One feature of particular note is FFI , once we have this people will begin to be able to run and develop applications that interact with C libraries (such as database bindings).

If you’re interested in a high performance Ruby, I’d encourage you to get involved: in testing it out, in writing bug reports, and in helping to build the missing features.

This is just the beginning of Topaz, there’s much work to be done. If you’d like to get involved you can find all the source code on Github. The documentation on ReadTheDocs. There’s a mailing list and #topaz on Freenode IRC to chat. I look forward to seeing you there.

There are innumerable people I’d like to thank for helping out on this project, I’ll attempt to enumerate them anyways.

First, Tim Felgentreff. When I started this project 10 months ago I believed it would be the work of a single person for a few months to get it to a release ready state. I could not have been more wrong. Tim has done amazing working to build Topaz, including huge portions of the core object model.

Charles Nutter, Evan Phoenix, and Brian Ford. Each of these individuals are developers of other Ruby implementations (JRuby and Rubinius), and they’ve provided enormous information and guidance about the Ruby language itself as we’ve built Topaz.

The PyPy team. Over the last few months the PyPy developers have worked tirelessly to make RPython an even better platform than it already was for building VMs of all sorts, not just for Python. Working with them on this task has been wonderful.

The Travis CI team. They’ve very kindly donated usage of Private Travis, and it has been phenomenal to use. I can’t recommend their product enough.

And no doubt many others. Thanks to everyone I’ve forgotten who read code over my shoulder, who reviewed and helped clarify documentation, who proofread this blog post, and every other little thing that makes this project possible.

Thank you, I look forward to seeing you around Topaz.