From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-11-12T09:45:02+09:00
Subject: Re: Porting Ruby: 1.8 or 1.9?

Jay Levitt wrote:
> 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.

Well, if you've got GCC, either one should be "easily ported". But 1.8 
has threads and a scheduler built into the language, while 1.9 has to 
have native OS threads available. So if you *want* threads, go with 1.8.

Then again, if it's all about fun, why not write a Ruby 1.9 interpreter 
  from scratch in PL/I?

<ducking>
>