From: Wilson Bilkovich <wilsonb@...>
Date: 2006-12-11T01:51:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Show your support for Rubinius!

On 12/10/06, Benjohn Barnes <benjohn@fysh.org> wrote:
>
> On 7 Dec 2006, at 16:53, Wilson Bilkovich wrote:
>
> > On 12/7/06, benjohn@fysh.org <benjohn@fysh.org> wrote:
> >> I'd like to know more about Rubinius, but all the info I've got on it
> >> are Evan's blogs on http://blog.fallingsnow.net/. Is there more info
> >> somewhere else?
> >>
> >
> > #rubinius on irc.freenode.net is a good resource.
> >
> > I'm going to write up an "installing and understanding Rubinius"
> > document, and Evan is working on some cool architectural diagrams that
> > we can then put on extremely geeky T-shirts.
> >
> > Current dependencies (this list will be getting shorter month by
> > month)
> > ruby:
> >  an existing install of 1.8
> >  sydparse
> >  RubyInline
> >  emp
> >  rake
> >
> > external:
> >  glib2
> >  gcc 4.0 or 4.1
> >
> > Right now the Makefile that bootstraps Rubinius isn't set up for other
> > compilers. You will need to modify it if you have something other than
> > gcc4.x. This is another temporary issue.  If someone wants to come
> > along and fix it, that would be cool. :)
> >
> > As soon as the glib2 dependency is gone (soon, hopefully), I will make
> > sure that Rubinius builds on Windows under VC8.
> >
> > After you have the dependencies installed:
> > rake shotgun # builds the C components
> > rake bk # builds the kernel
> > rake test_shotgun # runs the unit tests that are in 'shotgun-tests'
> >
> > Currently there are some test failures, but not too many. The bytecode
> > is compiled and stored in the 'code-cache' directory as .rbc files.
>
> Am I right that Rubinius:
>
>         1) Compiles Ruby directly to assembly language, and
>         2) Is actually written in Ruby, so can self host?
>
> Because that would be cool :) Although, for 1, doesn't it need a lot
> of work to target other processors, unless you're making use of an
> existing intermediate language (c for instance, or something inside
> the gcc compiler)?
>

It compiles to assembly language, but it is assembly language for the
Rubinius Machine, not, say IA-32. The Rubinius instruction set
architecture is then implemented in C for portability across processor
types.

The compiler is written in Ruby, and can self-host, but there is (and
always will be) C involved in the runtime.
As time goes on, more and more of that C will be generated from Ruby
(similar to the way the Squeak VM works.)

Singleton/metaclasses (i.e. class << self) and the ||= syntax were
added last night. Woo hoo!