Shopify's involvement with TruffleRuby began half a year ago, with the goal of furthering the success of the project and Ruby community. TruffleRuby is an alternative implementation of the Ruby language (where the reference implementation is CRuby, or MRI) developed by Oracle Labs. TruffleRuby has high potential in speed, as it is nine times faster than CRuby on optcarrot, a NES emulator benchmark developed by the Ruby Core Team.
I’ll walk you through a simple feature I investigated and implemented. It showcases many important aspects of TruffleRuby and serves as a great introduction to the project!
Introduction to Ruby Lazy Initialization
Ruby developers tend to use the double pipe equals operator ||= for lazy initialization, likely somewhat like this:

Syntactically, the meaning of the double pipe equals operator is that the value is assigned if the value of the variable is currently not set.

The common use case of the operator isn’t so much “assign if” and more “assign once”.
This idiomatic usage is a subset…