Ruby picks up the pace for scientific computing

The Ruby language is more commonly associated with web applications than it is with scientific computing. But VirtualModule, now in development, could help change that by making Ruby code run much faster.

"From my quick benchmarking, with VirtualModule, Ruby code runs 10 to 50 times faster when the number of loops is big," developer Kei Sewada said. The GitHub repo for VirtualModule says it can hopefully make Ruby code more than three times faster. VirtualModule is not the first venture for bridging Ruby and scientific computing; Sewada noted SciRuby as another project in this vein.

Provided as a rubygem, open source VirtualModule uses ruby2julia to transpile from Ruby to the Julia dynamic language for scientific computing.The transpiled program uses the msgpack interprocess messaging library to complete each RPC call, Sewada said.

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