Sasada Koichi just released his first proper version of his Ruby bytecode compiler and virtual machine, named YARV. While it’s all still very experimental code, you can execute small scripts and run the benchmarking suite. Certainly entertaining at least.

Building YARV requires a patch to current Ruby 1.9 code. You’ll need to check out from CVS, then patch and build Ruby.

 cvs -z4 -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.ruby-lang.org:/src co ruby
 cd ruby
 patch -l < ~/src/yarv-0.1.0/evalc.patch

 autoconf
 ./configure
 make
 make install

Make sure you use dash-lowercase-L as an option! The whitespace between CVS and the patch is ambiguous.

Now, go to your YARV directory, build the extension and run the benchmarks.

 ruby extconf.rb
 make
 make benchmark

I compiled on FreeBSD and it was necessary to use gmake above rather than make. The benchmarks take quite a while to run. If you’re impatient, you can get an inkling of the sort of speed YARV is seeing from the Cygwin benchmarks.