From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2001-12-04T06:01:45+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:27368] thoughts for future Ruby with bytecode VM

from the brainstorm department....

I'm working on a task distribution system which distributes runnable 
objects (objects which respond to a 'run' method) to various clients.  One 
thing I've had to do was define a 'remote_require' method on the clients 
so that I can send new runnable class definitions to clients so that they 
are 'aware' of new classes which the user might create (basically, I 
'stringify' the rb file which defines the class, send the string to the 
client and the client does an Object.class_eval(str) )

In the future, when Ruby's backend is some kind of VM that executes 
bytecode, it would be nice to be able to access the bytecodes which a 
particular class was compiled to so that the bytecode could be sent around 
instead of the actual text (assuming the bytecode is more compact than the 
text description - maybe not true).  So we'd have some method defined in 
Module or Class which is called something like: bytecode, which returns 
the bytecode definition for the class or module.  Maybe we would even have 
a new object type: Bytecode

#a.rb
class A
   def initialize
   end
   #...
   def method
     #blah
     dosomething
   end
end


#main.rb
require 'a.rb'
#now we 'know' about class A

classAbytecode = A.bytecode
#later, after a remote client is set up:

client.remote_require(classAbytecode)
#now the remote client will 'know' about class A
######end main.rb ########

BTW: maybe it would be nice to be able to access the definition 
of a class (as a string, without comments) as well (could this be done in 
the current 
version of Ruby):

#main2.rb
require 'a.rb' #from above

classStr = A.definition

puts classStr
=>
"class A
   def initialize
   end
   def method
      dosomething
   end
end"

Phil