On 9/15/05, Josh Charles <josh.charles / gmail.com> wrote:
> There is not now, nor will there ever be a 'one-size-fits-all'
> language.  It's that simple.  You can't implement Ruby in Ruby, you
> have to use C.  That's never going to change.

From an upcoming Rubyconf talk:

Reimplementing Ruby
Eric Hodel

MetaRuby is a reimplementation of ruby in ruby itself, involving a
rewrite of ruby's core libraries, parser, interpreter and garbage
collector. Metaruby will use the ruby2c translator in order to
bootstrap a new ruby binary. As Squeak Smalltalk has helped
demonstrate, I believe this will make ruby easier to develop and
maintain because developers will not need to work in both C and Ruby
when working on Ruby itself.

I will describe the process of porting ruby from C to ruby, lessons
learned during porting, our processes for maintaining consistency
between matz's ruby and MetaRuby (using and enhancing rubicon),
benefits this project will have for the ruby community, related
projects, and how we're using them.

Then I will grovel for contributors.