From: John Gabriele <jmg3000@...>
Date: 2006-06-10T05:23:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby's role in future operating systems

On 6/9/06, Kyrre Nygard <kyrreny@broadpark.no> wrote:
>
> Hey!
>
> I'm relatively new to Ruby, but for damn sure consider it
> the most important language to the future development of operating systems.
>
> Is there any material out there on this?
> Or does anybody have any thoughts or experience?

Syllable (http://www.syllable.org/ -- an alternative BeOS-like OS,
forked from Atheos) for now uses Ruby for at least a couple
substantial tools (the "Installer" and "Builder" apps I believe), and
probably for many more smaller system tools. They've got 1.8.4 running
there. I think they also use regular bash scripts for lots of other
stuff, like everyone else.

It seems that there was some interest in integrating Io into the OS
for a while, but then (quite recently) they decided to use REBOL
instead. I think part of the idea is that, besides using it for
command line scripts, they will provide a slick way to also write
Syllable apps using REBOL and their own IDE (called "sIDE"). The open
source implementation they're using is called Orca (possibly more info
here: http://wsrebol.sourceforge.net/ ).

That said, I'm sure they wouldn't mind having someone write some nice
Ruby-libsyllable bindings, just to give REBOL a run for its money. ;)
They might even have some Ruby bindings already underway -- dunno.