YJIT - Yet Another Ruby JIT

DISCLAIMER: Please note that this project is in early stages of development. It is very much a work in progress, it may cause your software to crash, and current performance results are likely to leave you feeling underwhelmed.

YJIT is a lightweight, minimalistic Ruby JIT built inside the CRuby/MRI binary. It lazily compiles code using a Basic Block Versioning (BBV) architecture. The target use case is that of servers running Ruby on Rails, an area where CRuby's MJIT has not yet managed to deliver speedups. To simplify development, we currently support only MacOS and Linux on x86-64, but an ARM64 backend is part of future plans. This project is open source and falls under the same license as CRuby.

If you wish to learn more about the architecture, there 3 recorded conference talks and two published papers:

• YJIT: Building a New JIT Compiler Inside CRuby (MoreVMs 2021)
• Simple and Effective Type Check Removal through Lazy Basic Block Versioning (ECOOP 2015 talk)
• Interprocedural Type Specialization of JavaScript Programs Without Type Analysis (ECOOP 2016 talk)

To cite this repository in your publications, please use this bibtex snippet:

@misc{yjit_ruby_jit,
  author = {Chevalier-Boisvert, Maxime and Wu, Alan and Patterson, Aaron},
  title = {YJIT - Yet Another Ruby JIT},
  year = {2021},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  journal = {GitHub repository},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/Shopify/ruby/tree/yjit}},
}

Installation

Start by cloning the yjit branch of the Shopify/ruby repository:

git clone https://github.com/Shopify/ruby.git yjit
cd yjit

The YJIT ruby binary can be built with either GCC or Clang. We recommend enabling debug symbols so that assertions are enabled during development as this makes debugging easier. More detailed build instructions are provided in the Ruby README.

./autogen.sh
./configure cppflags=-DRUBY_DEBUG --prefix=$HOME/.rubies/ruby-yjit
make -j16 install

You can test that YJIT works correctly by running:

# Quick tests found in /bootstraptest
make btest

# Complete set of tests
make -j16 test-all

Usage

Once YJIT is built, you can either use ./miniruby from within your build directory, or switch to the YJIT version of ruby by using the chruby tool:

chruby ruby-yjit
ruby myscript.rb

You can dump statistics about compilation and execution by running YJIT with the --yjit-stats command-line option:

./miniruby --yjit-stats myscript.rb

The machine code generated for a given method can be printed by adding puts YJIT.disasm(method(:method_name)) to a Ruby script. Note that no code will be generated if the method is not compiled.

Benchmarking

We have collected a set of benchmarks and implemented a simple benchmarking harness in the yjit-bench repository. This benchmarking harness is designed to disable CPU frequency scaling, set process affinity and disable address space randomization so that the variance between benchmarking runs will be as small as possible. Please kindly note that we are at an early stage in this project.

Source Code Organization

The YJIT source code is divided between:

• yjit_asm.c: x86 in-memory assembler we use to generate machine code
• yjit_asm_tests.c: tests for the in-memory assembler
• yjit_codegen.c: logic for translating Ruby bytecode to machine code
• yjit_core.c: basic block versioning logic, core structure of YJIT
• yjit_iface.c: code YJIT uses to interface with the rest of CRuby
• yjit.rb: YJIT module that is exposed to Ruby code
• test_asm.sh: script to compile and run the in-memory assembler tests
• vm.inc.erb: template instruction handler used to hook into the interpreter

The core of CRuby's interpreter logic is found in:

• insns.def: defines Ruby's bytecode instructions
• vm_insnshelper.c: logic used by Ruby's bytecode instructions
• vm_exec.c: Ruby interpreter loop

Contributing

We welcome open source contributors. If you are interested in contributing to this project, please contact Maxime Chevalier (@Love2Code) via twitter or by email (maxime.chevalierboisvert@shopify.com). You can also feel free to open new issues to report bugs or just to ask questions. Suggestions on how to make this readme file more helpful for new contributors are most welcome.