[ruby-talk:11115] Re: RFC: RubyVM (long)

On Tue, 13 Feb 2001, John van V. wrote:

> I have been following the Perl6 development on perl6_internals mailing list and
> many of the same questions come up.  Writing Ruby in ruby {to borrow from
> (P|p)erl} seems like pure brillance to me both in perl and ruby.

"Writing L in L" is called metacircularity.

For as long as I've been thinking about writing a compiler, I've
considered metacircularity as an essential feature.  This was in 1995 or
so... The idea was already pretty common in the 80's.  That Perl people
begin to talk about it now is pure coincidence (or not). 

> There was also talk of attaching various interperters (translators?) to a
> single VM,

I am interested in modular interpreters more than in adding translators
for other languages, but the former allows for the latter. 

> (presumably the perl one) using expertise from blackdown, python, etc. 

I doubt you'll be able to make, say, Ruby and Perl and Java people
agree on something about a common runtime environment.

BTW, I don't think "virtual machine" is an appropriate word to describe
anything in what I want to do. 

matju