Ruby 2.3.0 InstructionSequence

Ruby 2.3 has been released on Christmas day as every Ruby version. It comes with a nice present: the RubyVM::InstructionSequence class with methods to compile scripts, save them and load them later. A quick example:

rvm install ruby-2.3.0
rvm use ruby-2.3.0
cat > test.rb
class Christmas
  def self.day
    25
  end
end
p Christmas.day

cat > compile.rb
instruction_sequence = 
  RubyVM::InstructionSequence.compile_file("test.rb")
File.open("test.iseq", "wb") do |file|
  file.write(instruction_sequence.to_binary)
end

cat > instruction_sequence = nil
File.open("test.iseq", "rb") do |file|
  instruction_sequence =
    RubyVM::InstructionSequence.load_from_binary(file.read)
end
instruction_sequence.eval

ruby compile.rb
ls
compile.rb  execute.rb  test.iseq  test.rb
ruby execute.rb
25

It works!

InstructionSequence comes with a caveat:

The goal of this project is to provide “machine dependent” binary file to achieve:

• fast bootstrap time for big applications
• reduce memory consumption with several techniques

“Machine dependent” means you can’t migrate compiled binaries to other machines.

Does it means that the compiled code won’t work on another machine? I generated the .iseq file on a Ubuntu 12.04 machine and uploaded it to a Ubuntu 14.04 one, both 64 bit. It keeps working and the directory structure of the two machines can be different, despite the presence in the compiled code of metadata about the source file.

I invite the readers to check the other methods of the class. They let allow for the compilation of strings of text and procs, setting compilation options, disassembling iseq code plus several instance methods that operate on an instruction sequence.