From: James Britt <james_b@...>
Date: 2006-01-01T00:46:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Is the Ruby executable written in C?

Jeffrey Schwab wrote:
> Steve Litt wrote:
> 
>> Is the Ruby executable written in C?
> 
> 
> It seems to be written in a version of C that I found a little difficult 
> to read.  It uses old K&R style function declarations, and uses macros 
> in places I'm not used to seeing them.  Honestly, I'd love to spend some 
> time hacking the VM, but it looks prohibitively difficult.  Maybe 
> someone will enlighten me. :)

Might be an acquired taste.  I've not done any regular C coding in many 
years, (which may have helped here) but when crawling through the Ruby 
source some years back, in preparation for a book, I found it fairly 
easy to get used to the naming and coding conventions and figure things 
out.  It was a great help when trying to determine if some class or 
method had any potentially unexpected behavior that was not documented, 
or not documented correctly.

(I realize it may seem pretty obvious to say that the source code is a 
good place to look for this information, the point being that it is 
quite readable.)


James


-- 

http://www.ruby-doc.org       - Ruby Help & Documentation
http://www.artima.com/rubycs/ - Ruby Code & Style: Writers wanted
http://www.rubystuff.com      - The Ruby Store for Ruby Stuff
http://www.jamesbritt.com     - Playing with Better Toys
http://www.30secondrule.com   - Building Better Tools