From: Avi  Bryant <avi.bryant@...>
Date: 2005-04-08T07:59:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Seven new VMs, all in a row


Peter Suk wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I thought I'd talk about my new project here, since there is a good
> chance that someone might be interested in it.  I'm planning to put
> Ruby on top of Smalltalk VMs.

Hi Peter,

I'm definitely interested in this; please keep me posted.  Actually, a
couple of people are aware that I was looking into the possibility of
doing this as a commercial product - since, from my benchmarking, we
can get about a 20x to 30x speed increase by hosting Ruby on a
commercial Smalltalk VM like VisualWorks, it seemed like it might be
worthwhile.  However, the interest wasn't great enough for me to pursue
it, so I'm very glad that someone is.

A small note: you say "at least those that have namespaces", but
there's no need to be concerned about that.  Namespaces are an
image-level thing, not a VM-level thing; any Smalltalk VM worth its
salt can support namespaces just fine (and in fact constructs like pool
variables are effectively namespaces already, they just have somewhat
different conventions than Ruby's).

Avi