Very subtle differences in behavior. It's fine if you start writing your project targeting TruffleRuby, but its a nightmare porting a massive existing ruby codebase.
Compatibility is certainly an issue for massive codebases, OTOH I think over time TruffleRuby is getting closer and closer to CRuby behavior to the point it would be fairly rare to find a compatibility issue.
Do you have personal experience trying to run such a codebase on TruffleRuby?
We noticed many numerical operations sometimes didn't return the same class as cruby (Fixnum/Bignum/BigDecimal), sometimes resulting in wildly different calculation results.
Numerical to string formatting is a bit different too. Which makes the above problem even worse, compounded by how frequently ruby web code goes string to numbers to string to numbers.
When did you try?
Fixnum/Bignum are gone since many years (before 1.0RC1 which was April 2018, it's all Integer now).
So I guess many years ago, and back then TruffleRuby was basically implementing Ruby features, had fairly limited compatibility and likely could not run Rails, very different from today.
There were compatibility issues with BigDecimal, but TruffleRuby now uses the C extension, hence it should be exactly the same behavior as CRuby.
> Numerical to string formatting is a bit different too.
AFAIK that was fixed years ago if you mean float formatting.
> Regexes behave differently if they worked at all.
TruffleRuby always used Joni, which is literally a translation of CRuby's Regexp engine to Java (by the JRuby team), so that is very surprising and I have a really hard time to believe it.
At least "Regexes behave differently if they worked at all" seems harsh and highly inaccurate to me.
There likely were a couple Regexp issues but the generalization seems wildly exaggerated.
