Lightstorm

Simplified version of Firestorm targeting C instead of machine code directly.

You can find more details about our approach in this blog post: Lightstorm: minimalistic Ruby compiler.

Depending on the workload, lightstorm can significantly speedup the existing code. Here is an example of speedups observed for aobench benchmark. The compiled version (rightmost) decreases total execution time by nearly ~30%.

Development Setup

You can either use a codespace or a devcontainer. For a local setup, follow the steps below.

Install Dependencies

You need ninja, cmake (at least 3.28) and llvm 19.

On macOS:

brew install ninja cmake hyperfine llvm@19

On Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install ninja-build cmake

To install LLVM 19 follow the instructions here.

Checkout

git clone git@github.com:DragonRuby/lightstorm.git --recursive

Hello World

Build lightstorm binaries/runtime

# On Ubuntu
cmake --workflow --preset lightstorm-ubuntu-install
# On macOS
cmake --workflow --preset lightstorm-macos-install

Compile and run "Hello World" program

> echo 'puts "Hello, Lightstorm"' > hello.rb
> ./install.dir/bin/lightstorm hello.rb -o hello.rb.c
> clang hello.rb.c -o hello_lightstorm \
  -L./install.dir/lib/ \
  -isystem./third_party/mruby/include -isystem./third_party/mruby/build/host/include/ \
   -llightstorm_runtime_main -llightstorm_mruby -lm
> ./hello_lightstorm
Hello, Lightstorm

Build and run tests

Build a test (tests/integration/loads.rb):

> cd build.dir
> ninja loads.rb.exe
> ../tests/integration/Output/loads.rb.tmp.exe
1
-1
42
-42
1000
-1000
1000000
-1000000

42.0
a string 42
true
false
main
hello
[:a_sym]

Run integration tests

pip install lit filecheck
ninja run-integration-tests

Run benchmarks

ninja run-benchmarks

License

Lightstorm is released under MIT license.

Licenses from dependencies can be found in open-source-licenses.txt.

cagix/lightstorm