From: Sean Russell <ser@...>
Date: 2004-06-11T00:53:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Introducing myself and my interest in ruby

Hal Fulton wrote:

> I like the way you're thinking. I believe the principal reason a Ruby
> compiler (or C translator) doesn't exist is simply that no one has
> written one.

There are a few severe roadblocks to implementing this, the biggest one
being eval().  To support eval(), an executable needs access to the entire
Ruby interpreter.  This interpreter can be in the form of a dynamic
library, but then there isn't much difference between installing Ruby and
installing the interpreter library.  Or, the interpreter can be bundled
with the executable, which adds at least 5MB to the size of each executable
and still doesn't address the various library dependancies that can't be
discovered because of code like:

        class Foo
                def initialize
                        eval( "require 'gtk'" )
                end
        end

eval() is just one issue that confronts any attempt at creating an
application that converts Ruby to (C|Java|Native code|whatever), and I'm
sure there are others.

Which makes me think that a great thing to have would be a document that
identifies all of these cross-implementation difficulties.  Maybe we could
come up with a "portable Ruby" specification -- a minimal description of
the set of Ruby features that can be implemented without having access to a
Ruby interpreter.

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