From: Jay Levitt <jay+news@...>
Date: 2007-11-12T09:05:04+09:00
Subject: Porting Ruby: 1.8 or 1.9?

I've got a consulting gig at the moment, working on Stratus fault-tolerant
servers, and I don't have much excuse to play with Ruby.  So I thought
"Wouldn't it be fun to try porting Ruby to Stratus?"  

(Stratus servers - I can't really call them "minicomputers" anymore - run a
proprietary operating system called VOS.  It's written by some of the same
people who wrote Multics, and shares many of its features.  Two decades
ago, there wasn't even a C compiler available.  In recent years, they've
made some large strides toward portability, switching to a Xeon-based
platform, with POSIX.1 compliance built in, and gcc, perl5, SAMBA, and
other mainstays available.)

This would really be a just-for-fun project, for some strange values of
"fun". The VOS community is tiny and shrinking, and the types of businesses
still running VOS are not likely to adopt Ruby - last I heard, the biggest
codebases were in COBOL and PL/I in that order.  Even Stratus's own
marketing materials talk about "staying on the VOS platform if you choose
to do so" and migrating off it "as painlessly as possible".  It's far from
obsolete, but neither is it the future.

So, in all likelihood, the port wouldn't be used.  I just wanna see if I
can build it at all, and keep Ruby on my mind.  Disabling wide swaths of
functionality isn't a big deal (e.g. threads).

Can anbody recommend which tree - 1.8 or 1.9 - is easier to port to oddball
systems?  Anyone done that lately?  I seem to remember hearing about Ruby
running on a phone.

-- 
Jay Levitt                |
Boston, MA                | My character doesn't like it when they
Faster: jay at jay dot fm | cry or shout or hit.
http://www.jay.fm         | - Kristoffer