On Feb 2, 2005, at 12:00 PM, Benedikt Huber wrote:
> I guess the name Ruby2C and its goals are not well choosen, for in my
> opinion it makes no sense to rely on type inferal and conversion to
> C-types in a inherently dynamic language like ruby. Furthermore, it is
> very restrictive subset you choose.

not my place to say really as i'm not involved
directly in the project, but... the idea of ruby2c
is to make it possible to write an interpreter in
a fairly idiomatic ruby subset. the aim is not to
be used for directly executing end user code, but
instead for making a maintainable interpreter written
in this subset ruby, and for making it *much* easier
for ruby coders to write fast extension modules
without forcing them to code c :)

> In Smalltalk, altough most things are written in Smalltalk itself, they
> rely on a VM, which is able to interpret all kinds of smalltalk code. I
> think this approach, which maybe YARV may realize, is much more
> appropriate for a dynamic language like ruby.

maybe the paragraph is just confusing me :), but just in case,
the smalltalk vm doesn't directly execute smalltalk but instead
a fairly low level (though certainly not processor level) bytecode,
the smalltalk execution still requires compilation. much as with yarv.

yarv is written in c. thats already enough for me to
dislike it unfortunately though no offense to koichi he's
doing an *excellent* job.

Alex