From: Lothar Scholz <mailinglists@...>
Date: 2005-09-02T20:46:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby compilers (for DSP processors and alike)

Hello Bart,

BM> Hi guys,

BM> A few weeks ago, sbdy talked to me about Ruby, and Rails, and how 
BM> beautiful /sniff/ the language is. I took a look at it, and indeed, I
BM> love the simplicity, or let me rephrase, the humanity of the language.
BM> Definitely because I have a background in C/C++/Java, the first one
BM> missing the ability of easy 'meta-languaging', the second one being
BM> basically an OO hack of the first one (no offense meant), and the third
BM> one, well, ok, close but no cigar. The company I work for builds tool
BM> for optimizing algorithms (mainly multimedia applications), from the raw
BM> description until the target platform. The problem is that all those
BM> tools only accept C. I believe that Ruby might be a better choice for
BM> this, definitely in the early stages of the optimization, because you
BM> can analyse your program from a layer above it, which according to Godel
BM> is sometimes necessary. So in my off-duty time, I'm building some 
BM> examples to convince them. But alas, I already now their first question,
BM> and have no answer to it, and that's why I phrase it here: What if the
BM> code is optimized, how do you go to a platform with specific processors
BM> on them? For C, many are out there. So here is my question to you guys:

First of all i'm not sure if i understand you correctly.
Do you mean your company write optimized multimedia algorithms (or
build tools, what the hell is a build tool for an algorithm ????).

If you develop algorithms then you can use Ruby to prototype a new algorithm
(if it's not already way to slow even for this) but writting optimized
algorithm for processing multimedia in ruby is the hugest possible mismatch
of language and application domain i've seen so far. It's always my
example that in this cases a ruby program is about 100-200 times
slower then a c program.

If you only have a few optimized low level algorithms that are easy to
interface you could write a c extension and use ruby as a scripting language.

Maybe you could explain a little bit more what exactly you are looking
for and what you want to do with a ruby -> c translater (what kinds of
code should it translate ?).


-- 
 Best regards,                        emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
 Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
 CTO Scriptolutions                   Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's