From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2005-07-21T18:48:33+09:00
Subject: Re: [WAY OT] Re: Ruby/Rails as a starter language?

On Thu, Jul 21, 2005 at 03:57:35AM +0900, Rick Nooner wrote:
> Another approach would be to embed the OCaml runtime in Ruby
> which would allow it to load compiled OCaml libraries.
> Working out the call interface between OCaml functors
> and Ruby methods would be interesting.
> 
> OCaml is designed to be easily callable from C so this
> certainly should be possible.

The obvious alternative if OCaml is as fast as C: somebody just needs to
rewrite the Ruby interpreter in OCaml :-)

Or, write a Ruby to OCaml compiler (which clearly could be written in either
Ruby or OCaml). That would especially make sense if the run-time
environments are similar enough, e.g. if it could use OCaml's memory
allocation and garbage collection natively.

BTW, has anybody written a summary page comparing the features of Ruby to
languages like OCaml, Haskell, Eiffel, Smalltalk? (Explanations in terms of
doing X in Ruby versus X in those languages would be useful). Googling turns
up a lot of interesting-looking but broken links :-(

Regards,

Brian.