On Fri, 13 Jul 2001, MikkelFJ wrote:

> Unfortunately, Ruby will most likely have to accept certain limitations in
> order to run efficiently on these VM's - this is also what other languages
> have been enduring. A direct port could make Ruby much slower than it needs
> to be.

What you are saying is that languages should be giving up features until
they get about as fast as C#. But at the same time that means that all
those languages will lose most of their respective advantages because
they'll all become much more like C#.

But, you know, of the several hundred languages available for the Java
Runtime Environment (JRE) platform, many are still interpreted and remain
mostly untouched. I don't know how .NET is so different from JRE that,
unlike for JRE, all square languages should be fitted in round holes.

> > I maintain the following opinion: writing a good Ruby interpreter inside
> > Ruby first, and Ruby in Java second, would be easier than just Ruby in
> > Java; *and* results would be more incremental; *and* useful byproducts
> > would come out of it.
> What good would a Ruby in Ruby be? For understanding and clarification yes.

Well you know, it's HALF OF THE JOB! (assuming the code is optimized for
a deep understanding of what is going on).

And also most of the C builtins can be rewritten in Ruby at this stage,
which is that less you have to later write in Java (or C# or OCaml or
6809-assembler). MetaRuby already includes some of this.



> The compiler should plug well with development environemnts, which is
> also not ideal in Ruby - unless it can be bootstrapped to run on its
> own compilation running in the native enviroment.

Well, I assume bootstrapping would be used.



matju