Shopify is continuing to invest on Ruby on Rails at scale. We’ve taken that further recently by funding high-profile academics to focus their work towards Ruby and the needs of the Ruby community. Over the past year we have given nearly half a million dollars in gifts to influential researchers that we trust to make a significant impact on the Ruby community for the long term.

We want developments in programming languages and their implementations to be explored in Ruby, so that support for Ruby’s unique properties are built in from the start. For example, Ruby’s prevalent metaprogramming motivated a whole new kind of inline caching to be developed and presented as a paper at one of the top programming language conferences, and Ruby’s unusually loose C extension API motivated a new kind of C interpreter to run virtualized C. These innovations wouldn’t have happened if academics weren’t looking at Ruby.

We want programming language research to be evaluated against the workloads that matter to companies using Ruby. We want researchers to understand the scale of our code bases, how frequently they’re deployed, and the code patterns we use in them. For example, a lot of VM research over the last couple of decades has traded off a long warmup optimization period for better peak performance, but this doesn’t work for companies like Shopify where we’re redeploying very frequently. Researchers aren’t aware of these kinds of problems unless we partner with them and guide them.

We think that working with academics like this will be self-perpetuating. With key researchers thinking and talking about Ruby, more early career researchers will consider working with Ruby and solving problems that are important to the Ruby community.

Let’s meet Shopify’s new research collaborators.

Professor Laurence Tratt

Professor Laurence Tratt is the Shopify and Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Language Engineering at King’s College London. Jointly funded by Shopify, the Royal Academy, and King’s College, La