From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2007-04-05T06:29:43+09:00
Subject: Re: Some General Questions about Ruby

On Thu, Apr 05, 2007 at 05:22:00AM +0900, Chad Perrin wrote:
> > About the possibilities of Ruby, i know Ruby is a generic language, and
> > that we can program almost every software in Ruby, but *almost* every
> > for example, is it possible to develop a peripheral driver in Ruby ??
> > more generally to access the hardware ? to write a linux kernel module
> > ?? ( i guess it is not possible to write a ruby OS kernel )
> 
> I'd recommend against writing hardware drivers in Ruby, generally
> speaking, though I imagine it's possible.  Writing an OS kernel might
> prove a bit more difficult, with the interpreter-only implementation(s)
> currently available.  For that sort of thing, you probably want to stick
> to something like C, OCaml, or maybe even Haskell or compiled Lisp.
> Ruby (and even Perl) is a bit less practical for such purposes.

Although there are specific places where userland programs are intended to
hook into the kernel, and Ruby is fine for such things. For example, using
ruby fusefs you can write your own filesystem in Ruby.
http://rubyforge.org/projects/fusefs/