From: Renald Buter <buter@...>
Date: 2001-05-15T20:40:45+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:15155] Re: bytecode compilation

On Tue, May 15, 2001 at 01:27:00PM +0100, ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org wrote:
> On 5/15/2001 01:34 AM, Sean Russell wrote:
> >-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> >Hash: SHA1
> >
> >Je Dimancxo 13 Majo 2001 15:53, vi skribis:
> > > Not exactly what you want, but look at ruby2c (rb2c)
> > > http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/raa-list.rhtml?name=rb2c
> >
> >This is a wonderful idea, but I have three problems with it: it only works
> >with Ruby 1.4; the resulting executables are HUGE (but this could be a result
> >of my linking options); and the executables seem to be no faster than the
> >original script.
> >
> >I'm not complaining about rb2c; I just don't see the point of using it.
> 
> As the case with compiling other scripting languages, speed gain or
> small binary is not achievable anyway, because your scripting language
> code is not transformed into C, but merely packaged together with the
> interpreter. All the dynamic scripting languages are very hard to
> transform to C because of their nature. They still need the interpreter
> runtime to operate.
> 
> So the benefits of "compilation" are:
> 
> 1. packaging (making it easier for user)
> 2. source code hiding (making it harder to see/less obvious)
> 
> Regards,
> Steve

Probably a silly question, but how about 2native, JIT, etc. Would this also
be uncommonly hard to achieve? 

As I have always understood, converting to C is used as an intermediate
step towards native code, with while keeping a some kind of a pseudo
platform-independency --- or am I wrong here?

Renald