From: David Ross <dross@...>
Date: 2004-10-10T23:09:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby VM Projects

Eric Hodel wrote:

>David Ross (dross@code-exec.net) wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Eric Hodel wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>On Oct 9, 2004, at 2:06 PM, David Ross wrote:
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>>>Not to sound mean, but its more of a phase people(community) go 
>>>>through. Just like the Ruby Text editor phase we had 6 months ago. I 
>>>>guess its time for a new fad,VM creation.
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>No, people want the son-shi award.
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>I seriously don't see why people are wanting to recreate the wheel,
>>    
>>
>
>The wheel is broken.  matz says so, and if you look at eval.c, you'll
>see why.  Ruby needs a new interpreter.
>
>  
>
>>its not even being recreated in C.
>>    
>>
>
>There are few compelling reasons to use C.  There are few non-Japanese
>speaking Ruby interpreter hackers (I mean eval.c) because it is very
>difficult to get over the language barrier.  I believe matz has said
>that eval.c contains "black magic".
>  
>
Use C for speed. Yes, eval.c is not so great, and a syntax error which 
isnt very specific as what is wrong is bad.

>  
>
>>I was looking at all the VMs people were working on, which most are
>>being built on top of another VM. This is very wasteful.
>>    
>>
>
>I don't see how this is wasteful.  Writing a VM takes a lot of work, to
>be fast, and there are plenty of fast VMs out there.  Furthermore, its
>not very fun.
>
>Writing an interpreter in Ruby that can output to
>#{VM_or_language_of_choice} is much better for everybody because it
>lowers the barrier to entry for future interpreter hackers/tweakers/etc.
>
>  
>

My argument isn't to stop the efforts, its to get efforts organized 
instead of 1) wasting time 2) wasting people 3) creating several small 
projects which will go nowhere.

why 3? If only one person works on the project, or even just two. You 
will end up with code which might not look  completely right. No one 
will want to fix it. Project dead. Getting more people in projects will 
allow thought in implementation.

>>I can see if they were creating a project because of the license, or
>>perhaps the code was really bad. These projects are getting to be
>>really halarious to me.
>>    
>>
>
>People are writing interpreters because it is a Hard Thing To Do.
>(Count up all the nodes types in Ruby's AST, you'll see why its hard.)
>This difficulty makes it fun (very, very fun, I know from experience).
>
>Look at how many web frameworks Ruby has of varying complexity, or how
>many template tools.  Look at any other scripting language to see how
>many different tools to do whatever you want there are.  Many are of
>equal quality and similar licenses, but nobody's knocking them for
>duplicate effort.
>  
>

A better result would be to get many people and coordinate those efforts 
to accomplish a single task. Instead, we have 30 VM projects on the 
rise. A waste of man-power. I guess if they shed thier light you can 
also see some as "don't do in future". aka. Failures and Learning Exp.  
Which can be a good thing. 

/me wonders back to broken conversatoin with the Japanese on WideStudio 
:P (*never ever send unnatural Japanese, *ouch*)

--dross