From: brabuhr@...
Date: 2006-05-22T22:39:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Zed and Luis drop the bomb on Ruby's poor performance

On 5/22/06, Peter Hickman <peter@semantico.com> wrote:
> One question I have to ask is "Wouldn't it make more sense to piggy back
> on parrot (the Perl v6) engine?" and get all the benefit of the
> performance improvements that parrot will pick up and the fact that
> there are many, many very clever people working on parrot whose work we
> could make use of.
>
> Is there a reason why we are reinventing the wheel?

http://wiki.rubygarden.org/Ruby/page/show/VirtualMachineOptions

Cardinal
A re-implementation of Ruby on top of the [Parrot] virtual machine
This is the virtual machine that's being developed to support Perl 6
and other languages.

Availability
Parrot is currently in development. The Cardinal project has it's
homepage at [RubyForge]. However it has been dormant since August
2004.

In [languages/ruby] of the Parrot SVN repository there is an earlier
attempt at targetting Ruby on Parrot. The last real update of that was
in August 2002.

Advantages
   1. Access to large Perl development community and resources
   2. Will be able to use modules developed in and/or for Perl and
other Parrot-based languages
   3. The Ruby interpreter could be written in Ruby
   4. Native threads
   5. Precompiled bytecode
   6. JIT
   7. Possible speed improvement (but note that Parrot and Cardinal
are still in development)

Disadvantages
   1. Different C interface (But Parrot's C interface is also clean)
   2. Relies on Parrot, a large work-in-progress

Notes
   1. Not an "official" VM; when asked about VM Matz himself answered
he prefers to develop his own VM