From: Lothar Scholz Date: 2005-10-04T00:21:28+09:00 Subject: Re: Large Ruby Apps ? Hello Eivind, EE> Have you read the references on type inference for Self *which has EE> been real world implemented and has worked*? Yes i read. No it did not worked well - at least on the level people expect it here. I'm tired about this and will not discuss this here agein. Did you read the paper and did you read what optimizations where made ? EE> Do you have any concrete challenges in Ruby that you think are beyond EE> the challenges in Self? As far as I've been able to tell, the Self EE> implementation contains all the challenges that a Ruby implementaiton EE> would. Yes. With it's classless design its very hard, on the same level as ruby. They didn't get it done for Self and i doubt that anybody will get it done by ruby, because there are some facts that prevent it from at least general purpose useage. And yes i know all this python stuff too. It might work well on some problems (algorithms especially mathematical ones) but not on others (data handling) and all solutions have the problem that they don't work on larger code (as the memory consumptions grow exponentially). And on smaller code examples there is simply no reason to use an untyped script language. EE> If you don't, please stop scaring people - we want them to go EE> implement type inference for Ruby :) They can try. But i want see some theoretical paper about this first and then a paper that explains what they did with what precision, what are the conclusions and whats there explainations. The Self people didn't publish anything about this or if you know such a paper please post an URL. Smalltalk VM's gets most of its power from optimizing the control-flow and the garbage collector and not the data type inference. But even with this we can see an 30 times improvement of speed (as YARV shows). -- Best regards, emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com Lothar Scholz http://www.ruby-ide.com CTO Scriptolutions Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's