Reworking Memory Management in CRuby

Ruby is a dynamic programming language that was first released in 1995 and remains heavily used today. Ruby underpins Ruby on Rails, one of the most widely deployed web application frameworks. The scale at which Rails is deployed has placed increasing pressure on the underlying CRuby implementation, and in particular its approach to memory management. CRuby implements a mark-sweep garbage collector which until recently was non-moving and only allocated fixed-size 40-byte objects, falling back to malloc to manage all larger objects.

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Publication Details

Published
2025-06-13
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3735950.3735960
Primary Topic
Logic, programming, and type systems
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

Reworking Memory Management in CRuby

Stephen M. Blackburn, Kunshan Wang, Peter Zhu, Matthew Valentine-House
Logic, programming, and type systems
article

Reworking Memory Management in CRuby

Stephen M. Blackburn, Kunshan Wang, Peter Zhu, Matthew Valentine-House
article en

Abstract

Ruby is a dynamic programming language that was first released in 1995 and remains heavily used today. Ruby underpins Ruby on Rails, one of the most widely deployed web application frameworks. The scale at which Rails is deployed has placed increasing pressure on the underlying CRuby implementation, and in particular its approach to memory management. CRuby implements a mark-sweep garbage collector which until recently was non-moving and only allocated fixed-size 40-byte objects, falling back to malloc to manage all larger objects.

Australian National University (AU), Business in the Community (GB)
Openalex Percentile: Top 93%
Logic, programming, and type systems
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