From: Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale@...>
Date: 2007-11-12T00:42:09+09:00
Subject: Re: enterprise ruby

On Nov 10, 2007 8:02 PM, Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@sun.com> wrote:
> Lionel Bouton wrote:

> JNI to native extensions is a band-aid at best. The better option is to
> rewrite the libraries in terms of what's readily available on the JVM.

I don't know why this gives me a sense of deja vu.

I don't know how many here remember VisualAge/Java.  We (IBM/OTI)
built the first IBM Java IDE on top of what we called the UVM (or
universal virtual machine).  This was the IBM Smalltalk VM extended to
execute java bytecodes as well as Smalltalk bytecodes.

In this implementation, Java primitives were written in Smalltalk.
IIRC this was either before the JNI existed, or the JNI evolved to
make this impractical, and IBM moved to a Java only VM.

I know that it's difficult, and probably premature to define a
standard extension interface which would work across the various
emerging ruby implementations.  But without that I'm afraid that the
promise of having multiple implementations is somewhat muted.
-- 
Rick DeNatale

My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/