Descent into Darkness: Understanding your system’s ABI is the only way out

TL;DR: Slides from a talk describing how to rewrite the Ruby VM in memory <i>while it is running</i> in order to collect garbage which Ruby is not clever enough to collect for itself.<p>Yes, it sounds masochistic to me, too.

a) Clever. b) Cringe!<p>I really like Ruby as a language, but the ecosystem is just not up to snuff, which is why I've gone back to Python. The docs are complete, the standard implementation is rock solid and only getting better (cf. unladen-swallow), and I can interface with C stuff easily (cf. Cython). I'm looking forward to Ruby maturing.

Why not just add tracing code to the source and recompile? I don't immediately see an advantage to this kind of hot-patching in this case.

This stuff is just epic. I love it even though I'll never have a use for it, and don't see the point in the first place.<p>God bless crazy hackers, I live vicariously through your insanity.