From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2005-02-05T02:30:37+09:00
Subject: Re: lack of reaction to latest ruby implementations

In article <8b02f8cdcf99223628bcfaa886e88c7b@lypanov.net>,
Alexander Kellett  <ruby-lists@lypanov.net> wrote:
>On Feb 4, 2005, at 2:33 PM, mark wrote:
>> work it would be or if it would be a feasible goal.
>
>seems *very* ambitious. possibly too ambitious...

Possibly...

>
>> Like Phil Thomson I haven't had time to focus on Cardinal for a while 
>> now.
>
>thats a shame to hear :(
>wish ruby had more funding possibilities.
>

I'd love to get paid to work on Cardinal.  But nobody's lining up 
to pay me :-(   (and I'm not holding my breath)


>> 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.
>
>okay. so all in all slow progress. (parrot)
>so. quick question. why parrot? why not ironruby for example?
>mono is a hell of a lot more mature than parrot.
>net 2.0 will be getting all the highly used
>and needed language impl features that ruby has.
>

Well, I guess I can answer since I was the original instigator of Cardinal 
about 2 years ago...

At that point Perl was still very ubiquitous... now it actually seems less 
so...  so we thought that everyone would have Parrot installed eventually.  
also, Parrot would allow us to use the existing Perl libraries (CPAN) 
which are quite extensive.  And the Parrot VM promises to be quite a good 
performer...  Now with two years in the rearview mirror, perhaps some of 
those reasons don't stand up as well:
* Perl seems to have lost a lot of popularity to PHP (and some to Ruby and 
Python as well)
* We've built a lot of libraries in the RAA since then (though I'm told it 
still isn't as extensive as the CPAN :)
* Perl 6 seems to still be elusive...

However, the Parrot VM still seems like a good target because of it's 
performance.

As far as .net goes (or mono), well I guess I'm just not as interested in 
that platform (or in supporting it).

Phil