You Can't Rewrite Your Way Out of Big-O

Spinel is Matz's ahead-of-time Ruby-to-C compiler, and this month it acquired an unusual asset: a 40,000-line application it could not compile. When Roundhouse transpiles Lobsters for the Spinel target, it emits a ~370-file tree of plain Ruby — the app, its views desugared into methods, and the reified framework runtime. Two weeks ago, pointing Spinel at that tree produced a single core pinned at…