From: Evan Webb <evanwebb@...>
Date: 2005-07-12T11:10:22+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] Sydney Developer Preview 1 released

Thanks everyone for the feedback so far!

There were a few show stoppers that people found pretty quickly so
I've rereleased the tar.gz and update svn.

Available at: http://blog.fallingsnow.net/archive/sydney-dr1.tar.gz

On 7/11/05, Evan Webb <evanwebb@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sydney, an experimental ruby interpreter, has been released!
> 
> Release Announcment;
> http://blog.fallingsnow.net/articles/2005/07/11/sydney-developer-preview-release-1-out
> 
> Tarball: http://blog.fallingsnow.net/archive/sydney-dr1.tar.gz
> 
> Sydney is an experimental fork of ruby 1.8.2 that implements a number
> of new features, such as Native OS threads, Backtrace and Frame
> objects, more event hooks, and many more.
> 
> It has reached the a developer release phase after a few months of
> development and testing, but it is not ready for primetime! It still
> contains many issues that must be resolved before it can be considered
> production quality.
> 
> Note that it ONLY implements pthread OS threads at the moment, but
> work to implement win32 threads is planned to begin soon.
> 
> Currently, some conventions that I've interested have broken RDoc's
> ability to properly generate from my new C files. That will be fixed
> soon, but in the mean time, please consult the tests
> (test/sydney/*.rb) for examples and documention of the new features.
> 
> I'm sure there will be a number questions about this, so let me answer
> of few of them here:
> 
> Q: Why did you do all this work on the 1.8 branch and not off of head?
> A: I did this because I did not want a moving target in terms of
> existing functonality. I was already breaking a number of the
> internals and wanted to be able to run reliable tests to monitor my
> changes. If I had done my changes against head (1.9) I could have run
> into bugs that were not caused by my changes and would therefore been
> much harder to fix.
> 
> Q: Was this endorsed by the current ruby core developers?
> A: No, it was not. I did the work external from them completely, but I
> hope that that will change soon.
> 
> Q: Do you have something against the ruby core developers?
> A: No, I do not. They have done an amazing job with the current
> releases and none of my work would have been remotely possible without
> their work.
> 
> Q: Why did you go and implement these features?
> A: Sydney started as an experiment to get familar with the internals
> of ruby. I then began to see the need for most of these features
> either in RCR's or just in general, and thus I decided to, as one of
> my side projects, see how well they could be accomplished.
> 
> In the end, I did a lot of this because I found it interesting. And I
> know the their are people and applications out there that are eager
> for these features.
> 
> I look forward to feedback of all kinds.
> 
> Evan Webb // evan@fallingsnow.net
>