Every language community implements many of the same core components like garbage collection, just-in-time compilation, threading, tooling support, etc. Wouldn't it be great if there was an open source community making these technologies available to be used in all languages? This is exactly the goal of the OMR project: an open source project with reusable runtime technologies originating from the IBM J9 JVM representing hundreds of developer years of investment.

This talk describes a set of experiments conducted by IBM to test the use of several OMR technologies within the Ruby MRI runtime: GC, JIT, method profiling, and more. All this while still running real Ruby applications, including Rails. The talk will include the results from our experiments and ideas about the future of Ruby and OMR.