From: Matt Pattison <matchbo@...>
Date: 2005-10-03T16:30:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Large Ruby Apps ?

On 10/2/05, Eivind Eklund <eeklund@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/30/05, Leonardo Eloy <leonardo.eloy@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I agree that some sort of static analysis would allow Ruby codes to more
> > tightly immune to "bugs" (as Seltzer said).
> >
> > But the nature of Ruby's dynamism wouldn't allow that any sort of effort in
> > this area will work properly,
>
> I believe this is incorrect.  It should be possible to do a lot of
> static analysis in Ruby, it's just that there is some type inference
> etc that needs to be done first, and that is a significant amount of
> work to implement.
>
> An oldish reference that cover this fairly well is Ole Agesen's PhD
> thesis "Concrete Type Inference: Delivering Object-Oriented
> Applications" (available from
> http://research.sun.com/techrep/1996/abstract-52.html)
>
> That reference is based on work done in the language Self, which is
> prototype based, and contains the same challenges as (pure) Ruby.
> Things get much more complex if C is thrown into the mix, of course.

A much more recent example of this sort of type inference inference,
for a subset of Python, is Shed Skin:

http://shed-skin.blogspot.com
http://shedskin.sourceforge.net

It is a Master's Thesis and a Google Summer of Code project. It uses
Ole Agesen's Cartesian Product Algorithm, combined with what the
author calls "iterative object contour splitting", and converts
straightforward python code directly into C++ using type inference,
resulting in a ~ 10x speed up.

The guy seems to know what he's talking about, maybe some of these
ideas could be transferrable to an experimental, type inferring Ruby?

Matt Pattison