From: Jay Levitt <jay+news@...>
Date: 2007-11-12T10:40:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Porting Ruby: 1.8 or 1.9?

On Sun, 11 Nov 2007 19:45:02 -0500, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> 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.

Ah, interesting.  Does 1.9 have to have native threads just to run?  Or
only if you want to use threads from the application?

Actually, threads were probably a bad example, since (unless there are some
oddities in VOS's POSIX pthread implementation) I imagine they'll work OK.  

I was more wondering if, say, 1.9 used a more modern autoconf, or anything
like that.  One of the hardest things about porting apps to VOS is
apparently the autoconf scripts; they generally either (a) don't have the
notion of an "executable" suffix (a la .EXE), or (b) they do, but they
don't use it consistently - e.g. it works for native Windows but not for
the whole POSIX build path.  

When I tried to see if 1.8.6 would "just build", that was the first thing I
ran into; VOS executables end in .pm, but Ruby's autoconf script ignores
that for all the various tests it runs once it finds gcc.  (Worse, shell
scripts like autoconf are the single slowest thing you can run in VOS;
"fork" really creates a whole new login process, which takes about half a
second, so just getting through a configure script can take an hour or
more.)

Also, if Ruby assumes that x86 = little-endian, I've got some work to do.

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

My cardiologist tells me that I should try not to have too much fun at 
one time.

-- 
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