Christian Szegedy writes:

> But, what makes it inherently complicated to write some
> Ruby to C compiler which speeds up the code significantly?

> The lack of the instance typing mechanism of Ruby.

> Whithout this, no compiler would produce essentially faster code
> than a good interpreter.

Well, just to quibble, but the Smalltalk and Lisp compilers do
remarkably well.  This is old technology.  Hard technology, but
old.

Personally, I've been wondering if there would be a nice way to
adapt the GNU Sather compiler to coexisting with Ruby.  Sather is
one of my favorite languages, although it's very obscure and has
been floundering a bit since it left ICSI at Berkeley.

It's a contravariant OO langauge (although maybe I've got that
backwards) with iterators, garbage collection, closures, and
so on.  It's also very very fast.  For years, its parallel
computing version, pSather, was one of the major numerical
workhorses for parallel codes on the Berkeley campus.

It seems philosophically similar enough to Ruby that Ruby could
conceivably borrow a few ideas from it.  I'd love to be able to
write Ruby extension modules in Sather.

--Johann

-- 
Johann Hibschman                           johann / physics.berkeley.edu