Blog: Demystifying Ruby 3/3 : Memory Management

Garbage collection (GC) is an essential process in any programming language that manages memory for the programmer. In Ruby (this article is about the MRI), the garbage collector plays a crucial role in ensuring efficient memory usage and preventing memory leaks.

The Heap and the Stack

Memory in a Ruby program is divided into two main regions:

• The Heap: This is where dynamically allocated memory lives. Objects created at runtime, such as strings, arrays, and hashes, are stored here. The garbage collector primarily operates on the heap to free up unused memory.
• The Stack: This is where method calls, local variables, and control flow data are stored. The stack is managed automatically and follows a Last In, First Out (LIFO) structure. Each time a method is called, a new stack frame is created; when the method completes, its stack frame is removed.

Ruby’s garbage collector is responsible for:

One of the most fundamental principles of Ruby is that everything in the language is an object. This object-oriented allows developers to think in terms of objects and their interactions rather than just functions and procedures.

In Ruby, every piece of data, whether it’s a number, string, array, or even a class itself, is treated as an object. This means that all these entities can have properties and behaviors, encapsulated within methods and attributes. Let’s explore this !

Ruby is a dynamic, interpreted, open-source programming language known for its simplicity, productivity, and its “human-readable” syntax. Ruby is often used in web development, particularly with the Ruby on Rails framework. It supports object-oriented, functional, and imperative programming paradigms.

The most known and used Ruby Virtual Machine is the Matz Ruby Interpreter (aka CRuby), developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto (aka Matz), the creator of Ruby. All other Ruby implementation such as JRuby, TruffleRuby and so on are out of the scope of this blog post.

Kube & the CKA

Kube, k8s or Kubernetes is the industry leader when you need to orchestrate some containers at scale. The containers war is over : Swarm, Mesos and all other alternatives are dead (except Nomad under some circonstances).

The Certified Kubernetes Administror (CKA) is a certification delivered by the Cloud Native Coputing Fundation (CNCF) and the Linux Fundation that will ensure that the certified peoples have the skills and knowledge to operate as cluster administrators.

From netcl to iwd 📡

ArchLinux is installed on my laptop (an XPS 15) since I got it from my job in 2017¹. 3 years ago, the cli tool distributed within the distribution was netctl. It’s an in-house ArchLinux project allowing users to manage networking. Overall, the tool does everything I need to get a network connection up and running the way I need it. One of the main thing I dislike about it is wifi-menu, a poorly design UI to search for wireless access points.

Elixir, the path to functional programming ⚗️

With my Rust rediscovery a lot of functional programming concepts became less obscure. In order to go deeper into this paradigm I chose Elixir a powerful general purpose, functional programming language, compiled and executed inside the Erlang virtual machine (BEAM).

But why Elixir, if Erlang exists ? Because :

Elixir, is Erlang with underpants - Athoune

Unlike Erlang, the Elixir syntax is clear and elegant. The language comes with everything you need, included : interactive shell, deps tooling, building tooling and more…

Rust, the (re)discovery 🗺️

Back to 2014, the year I wrote my first Rust program ! Wow, that was even before version 1.0 !

At my school, it was all about C, and 10 years of C is quite boring (because, yes, I started programming way before my engineering school). I wanted some fresh air, and even if I really liked Python back to that time, i’m more into statically typed programming languages.

To infinity… and beyond!

DevOps, IaC, AGILE, SCRUM, Containers, SysOps, CI/CD, microservices, serverless, FAAS

Yes, it’s a buzzwords shitstorm but all of these concepts summarize how software development and deployment evolves. Do i think that sysadmins time is over ? No.

But time as come, we, as sysadmins, have to adapt to this moving industry.

Accept it or die, but cloud computing is the norm now. Small IT companies with “good old LAMP” as the only business model will die soon.

Hi !

New year, new blog.

A quick post to introduce me and this site : I’m Wilfried, a junior SRE.

I will used this plateform to share experiences and opinions about dev and ops worlds.

Feedback is and will be always welcome, if you want to contact me, see the footer below.

Have a nice read !

Bye !