Was curious, but are any NoSQL DBMS written in Ruby?
And if not, would it be unwise to create one in Ruby?
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Was curious, but are any NoSQL DBMS written in Ruby?
And if not, would it be unwise to create one in Ruby?
In 2007, Anthony Eden played around with RDDB, a CouchDB-inspired document-oriented database. He still keeps a copy of the code in his GitHub account.
I vaguely remember that at or around the same time, someone else was also playing around with a database in Ruby. I think it was either inspired by or a reaction to RDDB.
Last but not least, there is the PStore library in the stdlib, which – depending on your definition – may or may not count as a database.
The biggest problem I see in Ruby are its concurrency primitives. Threads and locks are so 1960s. If you want to support multiple concurrent users, then you obviously need concurrency, although if you want to build an embedded in-process database, then this is much less of a concern.
Other than that, there are some not-so-stellar implementations of Ruby, but that is not a limitation of Ruby but of those particular implementations, and it applies to pretty much every other programming language as well. Rubinius (especially the current development trunk, which adds Ruby 1.9 compatibility and removes the Global Interpreter Lock) and JRuby would both be fine choices.
As an added bonus, Rubinius comes with a built-in actors library for concurrency and JRuby gives you access to e.g. Clojure’s concurrency libraries or the Akka actors library.
Performance isn’t really much of a concern, I think. Rubinius’s
Hashclass, which is written in 100% pure Ruby, performs comparably to YARV’sHashclass, which is written in 100% hand-optimized C. This shows you that Ruby code, at least when it is carefully written, can be just as fast as C, especially since databases tend to be long-running and thus Rubinius’s or JRuby’s (and in the latter case specifically also the JVM’s) dynamic optimizers (which C compilers typically do not have) can really get to work.