From: avi@...4.com (Avi Bryant)
Date: 2004-07-23T13:46:59+09:00
Subject: Re: Which compiled language is closest to Ruby?

Gully Foyle <nospam@nospamnospamnospam.com> wrote in message news:> Great questions.
>
> I'd like:
> 
> reasonably small standalone executables--doesn't have to be tiny like c 
> programs.  understandable to require a largish runtime as a shared 
> library similar to gcj programs.  must be impossible to automate 
> creation of original source code from the executable.
> 
> ability to produce shared libraries in both Linux/*BSD and Windows (on 
> Windows, I'd like to be able to use static libs I can use from Visual 
> C++ 6 apps if possible in addition to dll)
> 
> speed? faster is nicer but it doesn't have to be a speed demon since I 
> can use c/c++ to optimize where needed and its easy to call those from 
> ruby. any improvement would be acceptable--even 1%.

Ok.  The closest thing to Ruby, then, is almost certainly Smalltalk/X,
which has already been mentioned once in this thread:
http://www.exept.de/exept/english/Smalltalk/frame_uebersicht.html . 
When developing, you use JITted bytecode, but you can also generate C
to produce standalone apps or libraries on Windows or Linux (not sure
about *BSD, but I bet you could get a port out of them if you pushed).
 It comes with a very nice development environment, is many times
faster than Ruby, and has a nearly identical object model.  It's
recently been made free as in beer, and I believe it comes with full
source code.  It does not, however, have a very large user community -
most Smalltalkers use other implementations that wouldn't meet your
compilation needs.

Another language you might be interested in is Dylan. 
http://www.gwydiondylan.org/ is the main open source implementation.

Cheers,
Avi