ruby-pg

Before we proceed, are you aware that a lot of popular database drivers for Ruby (and Python? not sure) implement the performance-critical bits in good old natively compiled C? For example, the Ruby postgres gem: https://github.com/ged/ruby-pg/tree/master/ext (I wasn't sure until I checked just now, so I'm not questioning your familiarity with the tech. Just not sure if that's commonly known) So no, it's not the database, it's your interpreted language. Or it's your developers. If you're moving enough data over the wire that application-side serialization/deserialization becomes an issue, often this is because developers are retrieving a whole truckload of records when they really only ought to be returning one. Even in a fast application language, this is a problem. You're still burning extra CPU cycles, you're still allocating extr

> each is in its own OS thread and GVL releases when the thread blocks. The GVL isn't automatically released when a thread blocks on IO. Each bit of native code performing IO has to explicitly release it like in the pg gem here: https://github.com/ged/ruby-pg/blob/fb465855ce1dd12cf7eb69c9... If you don't need high concurrency then using threads is simpler.

I think the problem with the intrinsics approach is that lots of this code isn't stdlib but extensions like: https://github.com/ged/ruby-pg/blob/6853309b64852755daed3e9c... I don't really see a good solution here other than lifting the control flow to Ruby with specific bytecode ops to minimize overhead and a good, typed FFI like LuaJIT has? Am I missing something?

Go take a look at the source code for ruby-rmagick, ruby-pg, nokogiri, or mongrel. https://github.com/rmagick/rmagick https://github.com/ged/ruby-pg https://github.com/tenderlove/nokogiri