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by mattbee 1903 days ago
20 years ago, I shipped a Ruby/SDL powered quiz game to a network of Windows NT4-powered games cabinets in pubs. They had 64MB RAM and the jerky animation due to garbage collection pauses ATE ME ALIVE for about 6 months.

What's changed in Ruby since then to make smooth animation possible?
3 comments
wukerplank 1903 days ago
Seems like this game engine is built on top of RubyMotion which compiles to byte code - no (slow) Ruby VM. This probably also allows them to bundle the game for many platforms.

For hobbyists Gosu (https://www.libgosu.org/ruby.html) should be good enough, but is not very convenient to bundle and distribute.

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leetrout 1903 days ago
Further down on the page:

> Optimized for size and speed. This is not the same Ruby you'd use for building web apps with Rails (far from it).

> DragonRuby is powered by highly optimized C code written by Ryan C. Gordon. He is one of the core maintainers of libSDL

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endemic 1903 days ago
Name dropping Ryan Gordon sold me on taking this for a spin.
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toomanybeersies 1903 days ago
For a start, most computers have more than 64 MB of memory these days.

The GC has changed a lot in the past 20 years too. Here's a great talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcQ-hIfiljA

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