Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:
> Hello friends!
> 
> On the JRuby project, we have endeavored to create an engine for running 
> YARV/Ruby1.9 bytecodes as part of our JVM-based runtime. I did the 
> initial work, getting basic things like fib working, and Ola added many 
> bytecodes, refactored, and got tail calls and inline caching working. 
> The work seems very promising as a way for us to maintain future 
> compatibility with ahead-of-time compiled Ruby 1.9 source.
> 
> However we have no Ruby 1.9 bytecode compiler. The existing compiler is 
> written in C, and the porting effort is nontrivial.
> 
> Is there any effort to write a Ruby 1.9 bytecode compiler in Ruby, so we 
> might be able to use it directly?

It's worth mentioning that we're weighing bytecode options right now. 
Rubinius is also a possible alternative, since it already has a 
Ruby-based compiler we could use. We'd hate for Ruby 1.9 bytecode to 
fall behind because of the extra time we'd need to write and support a 
compiler, and it seems like a "good idea" to have a compiler written in 
Ruby.

- Charlie