Spinel: Ruby AOT Native Compiler

It is an AOT compiler that compiles Ruby source into standalone native binaries. It generates optimized C code based on whole-program type inference, and the backend itself is written in Ruby, giving it a self-hosting structure.

The pipeline works in the order Ruby -> AST -> C source -> native binary. The parser uses Prism (libprism), and the C binary and the CRuby+Prism gem fallback produce the same AST output. require_relative is inlined at parse time.

In benchmarks, it is presented as roughly 11.6x faster on geometric mean compared to the latest CRuby miniruby. The performance gap was large for compute-intensive tasks, for example:

• life 86.7x
• ackermann 74.8x
• mandelbrot 58.1x
• fib 34.2x
• nqueens 30.4x

In tests with a more practical character, it also showed improvements of json_parse 10.1x, ao_render 8.0x, and template engine 6.2x. It states that a total of 74 tests and 55 benchmarks passed.

The scope of support is also specific. It supports classes, mixins, blocks, exception handling, String/Array/Hash, regular expressions, bigint, Fiber, I/O, and more, and reduces GC burden by promoting small immutable classes to value types. Optimizations such as string concatenation flattening, loop length hoisting, constant propagation, automatic bigint promotion, and symbol constantization are also included.

Structurally, spinel_codegen.rb handles the compiler backend, lib/sp_runtime.h handles the runtime, and lib/regexp/ handles the built-in regexp engine. In other words, it is a project that implements a high-performance AOT compiler for the Ruby ecosystem at an experimentable level.