From: markus liedl <markus.lado@...>
Date: 2001-10-25T14:53:21+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:23263] Re: [ANN] RubyInRubyParser 0.1-pre-alpha


> Is the intent for this to eventually lead to a Ruby VM written in Ruby?
> 

Yes, sooner or later. The last few weeks I passed in learning Lisp and
Smalltalk. I'm not sure which one may be better suited: VM written in Lisp, or
modified Smalltalk VM. But surely both are easier to handle than a VM in C.


For "GNU Smalltalk" Paolo Bonzini has created GNU Lightning, which is an
portable machine code assembler, implemented as C macros. The interesting
excercise is: "To find a minimal C program that can interpret a subset of Ruby, but
also assemble it to machine code, (and surely the subset is larg enough to
build FullRuby in a FullRubyInSmallRuby manner on it)".
GNU Lightning should work with x86, sparc and ppc. But it's nothing than the
backend of machine code generation.

Maybe a VM based on this idea would be bleeding fast, even if only a small
subset of available assembler instructions is used.

Another idea I followed some time, is to 'missuse' GCC as JIT compiler, but
there are some problems:
* copyright / there will never be a libgcc
* memory leaks


> 
> I just downloaded Squeak (www.squeak.org) this afternoon and played with 
> it for a while, it's quite cool that the squeak VM is written in squeak.
> The whole squeak system is pretty cool, but I don't know Smalltalk.
> 

There are lots of possibilities to extend matju's MetaRuby. To share
implementations of high level language features (HLLF ?) between different Ruby
VM's.

Sadly there isn't to much documentation on learning Smalltalk on the net.


markus


-- 
-------------------------------------------------