From: mark <msparshatt@...>
Date: 2005-02-04T22:33:49+09:00
Subject: Re: lack of reaction to latest ruby implementations

Alexander Kellett wrote:

> On Feb 4, 2005, at 1:15 PM, Phil Tomson wrote:
>
>> Yeah, Cardinal has been pretty quiet for a while now.  I wish I had more
>> time to work on it.  We actually had a plan to go the other direction 
>> from
>> Ruby2C: We wanted to convert RubyC to Ruby so we could automatically
>> convert the built-in classes like array.c, hash.c, etc to Ruby code.  If
>> we could do something like that it would be useful for metaruby as 
>> well, I
>> suspect.  Basically, we need a C parser in Racc - that's the first step
>> anyway.  There are plenty of C grammars out there, so that shouldn't be
>> too, too hard, but then again...
>
>
> google pyggy. it includes a ansi c parser.
> modify it to generate ruby eval-able structures
> and load them into ruby. later on port it to ruby,
> i'll help, i'm planning to do so anyways at some
> point.
>
After a quick look at the PyGgy site, 
http://www.lava.net/~newsham/pyggy/, it seems to be a parser generator 
written in Python. In which case it might be better to use either Racc 
or Rockit.

Though I'll look more closely to see if I'm missing something.

> would you really want to convert the c anyway?
> its a hell of a job and doesn't really provide
> much anyway. the point in a ruby core lib written
> in ruby itself is to have a well coded basis and
> doing it in idiomatic c would thusly seem like
> a much better idea, or am i missing something?
> from the slant of correctness, yes i'd agree its
> a nice aim. but i think it would be such a huge
> investment that you may as well spend the time
> writing testcases and idiomatic ruby...
>
Well the problem was interfacing Parrot with the core lib. The first 
solution we tried was using Parrot's native call interface to directly 
acces rubylib, but that didn't work.

The next best solution seemed to be to produce a converter which could 
translate the c code in to Parrot InterMediate Code. This project didn't 
really get past the planning stage so I don't know how much work it 
would be or if it would be a feasible goal.


>> .....ah, but our ambitious plans haven't led to much action, 
>> unfortuneatly.
>> I haven't had any time to commit to Cardinal since last summer.
>
>
> how about the other developers? 

Like Phil Thomson I haven't had time to focus on Cardinal for a while now.

> i thought
> there were a few working on it? maybe i was
> mistaken, seems like a shame. how fast are
> the python / perl6 implementations written
> on top of parrot now?
>
AFAIK the perl6 implementation is still in the early stages. They have a 
working parser engine and are working on the perl 6 grammar.

I don't know how far along the the python implementation has gotten.


--
Mark Sparshatt