Rick DeNatale wrote:
>  From what I've seen of the 1.9 code, there really isn't a compiler
> from Ruby to YARV bytecodes per-se.  It's still using the old compiler
> which generates an abstract syntax tree, then YARV generates the
> bytecode from the AST.

Yes, and perhaps that's one reason why there's no ruby-based compiler 
right now: no standard AST API in the main dists. Granted I'm not 
familiar enough with "ripper", knowing only the ParseTree libraries, 
both in C and JRuby, but it seems like it would be of tremendous value 
to have a ruby-based compiler for YARV bytescodes. As it stands now, we 
can choose to use Rubinius bytecodes, for which there's a 
ParseTree-based compiler, or YARV, for which we'd have to implement our 
own compiler (already started by Ola). One has the benefit of requiring 
much less effort to use and maintain, and one has the benefit of 
compatibility with "official" Ruby 2.0 work.

- Charlie