On Sat, 22 Jul 2006, Austin Ziegler wrote:

> No, Ara, it's not a language feature. It's something that *can* be done, but
> you'll note that Ruby doesn't ship with a compiler on any other platform.

> And don't tell me that that's because those other platforms include
> compilers -- you don't put a compiler on a real production machine.

[OT]

that's a matter of taste - we certainly do - quite a bit of our stuff compiles
stuff on the fly.  we even load shared memory with pre-compiled tables at
times - this is triggered when updates to a backing store are made.  the
technique gives us fast lookups: 2 orders of magnitude faster than berkeley
db, 1 order of magnitude faster that gperf generated hashes.  as someone who
manages two 30 linux clusters dedicated to doing fast near-realtime production
(and research) commputations i assure you that compilers are often a crucial
runtime component on those sytems where rt code generation (and this is not
uncommon in science) exist.

> A C/C++ compiler is wholly separate from Ruby and must be treated as such.

agreed - but the ability to find and use it (along with other tools like
install-sh or ar) is.  just like the ability of certain ruby libs to use the
network, by removing the thing it uses one can say you've broken that ruby
capability.

regards.


-a
-- 
suffering increases your inner strength.  also, the wishing for suffering
makes the suffering disappear.
- h.h. the 14th dali lama