From: MonkeeSage <MonkeeSage@...>
Date: 2008-01-03T11:14:59+09:00
Subject: Re: Where's the bytecode from Ruby 1.9

On Jan 2, 8:35 am, James Dinkel <jdin...@bucoks.com> wrote:
> Paul Brannan wrote:
> > It uses a bytecode representation internally, but doesn't currently
> > write the bytecode to disk like python does.
>
> > The VM::InstructionSequence class gives some access to the bytecode.
> > You can get the individual elements of the sequence by calling #to_a.
>
> > There is support in Nodewrap for saving/restoring instruction sequences,
> > but needs to be updated for the latest 1.9.
>
> > Paul
>
> Thanks for the reply.  There would be some startup-time savings if it
> just converted to bytecode once, saved it to disk, and then could be
> loaded straight from bytecode, right?  Does anyone know if that
> functionality is on the horizon? Of course there is a finite amount of
> time in a day for the developers to work on ruby, so I have no problem
> being patient.  I just think ruby may get more business backing if it
> can hide it's source code (for those who write closed-source software)
> and would also keep people from making a "quick change" to production
> code (ie introduce breakage to production code).
>
> I would guess if it is already converting to bytecode internally than it
> is getting some runtime performance benefits from it, and that's where I
> personally would rather see the biggest speed improvements anyway.
>
> James
> --
> Posted viahttp://www.ruby-forum.com/.

IIRC, before YARV was merged, it had an option to save / load bytecode
to / from files. But it's been a year or two and my memory is kind of
cloudy. Maybe it was a test or example ruby script that did it rather
than YARV core...hmm...can't recall. But if so (either from core or
from exposed API), then it seems like a good bet that KRI will be able
to do that someday (and like Charlie said, JRuby is already adding
support, which will presumably be made binary-compatible with a dump
from KRI if / when it's implemented).

Regards,
Jordan