From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-11-13T05:18:04+09:00
Subject: Re: McGovern Likes JRuby...

Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:
> I'll dodge this one by saying this: there are a lot of good VMs out 
> there that could be put to use running Ruby code, and from what I know 
> about Ruby there's nothing that would prevent them from running 
> extremely well. Ruby isn't that idiosyncratic, and most of its 
> idiosyncracies are just syntactic sugar.
Well ... actually there *aren't* a lot of good VMs out there. The JVM 
and the Microsoft CLR are probably the only two "industrial strength" 
ones out there.

Parrot? Well ... if they ever get it finished ... if Perl and Python and 
Ruby all have active teams porting the languages to it ... etc., etc., etc.

Now, if you're willing to limit yourself to Scheme or Forth, there are 
some good language-specific VMs out there. But there's no marketing 
muscle behind any of them, so it's strictly a labor of love. There are 
pieces of these I think a Ruby VM "should" have -- tail recursion and 
continuations from Scheme and threaded inner interpreters, a stack 
machine architecture and an inline assembler from Forth. But most of the 
people working with and on Ruby know C, Java and C# (and Perl, Python 
and PHP)  much better than they know Scheme or Forth.


-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/

If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits fire.