From: Wilson Bilkovich <wilsonb@...>
Date: 2007-09-29T01:08:30+09:00
Subject: Re: need a simplified understanding of Rubinius

On 9/28/07, James Edward Gray II <james@grayproductions.net> wrote:
> On Sep 28, 2007, at 10:47 AM, Wilson Bilkovich wrote:
>
> > On 9/27/07, Dave Rose <bitdoger2@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >> ...just curious...how does Rubinius 'boot' itself up and how does
> >> translate ruby into bytecode.... i know a little about parsing and
> >> compilers ... but what makes rubinius different? i hear it is
> >> actually
> >> written in ruby... but that's circular? like MC Ecsher the hand
> >> drawing
> >> a hand?....tia dave
> >
> > Basically what you do is you write a first implementation using
> > language A. Then you use that implementation to create an 'artifact'
> > that is capable of running language B. If you do this carefully, you
> > can then discard everything you wrote in language A.
>
> Isn't there a Scheme book with a Scheme implementation written in
> Scheme in it?  If my memory serves, I think I even remember Evan
> talking about this being some of the inspiration for Rubinius.
>

That is true, yeah. However, our more direct inspiration is the
Smalltalk-80 book. The last section of that book is a Smalltalk VM
written in Smalltalk.

Here is a link with some links to more links. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta-circular_evaluator