From: Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@...>
Date: 2009-12-05T03:28:11+09:00
Subject: Re: [Link] Development of Ruby VMs

On 3 Dec 2009, at 11:30, Jörg W Mittag wrote:
> Eleanor McHugh wrote:
>> On 2 Dec 2009, at 15:40, Jörg W Mittag wrote:
>>> Among the ones that *are* still being developed and that are missing
>>> from the list are:
>>> 
>>> * tinyrb (Marc-André Cournoyer's tiny Ruby-subset VM)
>> Hopefully this list will soon be joined by RubyGoLightly, my project
>> to port TinyRb from C to Go and then see where that leads. Anyone
>> interested in helping (or chucking stones) can find work in
>> progress at:
>> 
>> 	http://github.com/feyeleanor/RubyGoLightly
> 
> This looks very cool!
> 
> Now, if only tinyrb worked on Windows, Go worked on Windows and I
> could overcome my deep-seated hatred against so-called "systems
> programming languages"[1] and actually bring myself to learning the
> damn thing.

Well I'm not holding my breath on Go making it to Windows anytime soon, but I hope I'm wrong.
I also share many of your feelings about "systems programming languages", compounded by the fact I spend a lot of time working on C codebases. Part of what I find appealing about Go is that it reads like a high-level language, that and the fact that it provides a decent native concurrency model.

> Anyway, regarding your "see where that leads", I have a couple of
> questions:
> 
> * Are you planning to use Go's garbage collector or provide your own? 
>    Currently, tinyrb uses the Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative 
>    garbage collector (AFAIK anyway), which incidentally is also the 
>    collector used by one of the two Go implementations. Marc-André 
>    was considering switching to reference counting, which 
>    incidentally is also what the *other* Go implementation is 
>    planning on doing.

I'd like to phrase everything to leverage Go's garbage collection, the same way that JRuby uses the JVM's collector.

> * Are you simply using Go as an implementation language, like, say, 
>    tinyrb, MRI, YARV or Rubinius do or are you planning some sort of 
>    interoperability between Go and Ruby as JRuby and IronRuby do or 
>    even a very deep unification of the two languages like MacRuby and 
>    MagLev?

As Go's still a bit of a moving target I'm initially looking at it as an implementation language, although supporting NaCl and other elements of Google's emerging software platform would be interesting.

> * Are you planning on implementing Threads with Goroutines? What about 
>    Fibers, Continuations?

It'll use Goroutines for both Threads and Fibers, and I'm interested in using the Go Iterator pattern to implement Ruby Enumerators.

Continuations should also be feasible, although a lot depends on how the VM's instruction set evolves and the 

> * Are you planning on surfacing the CSP/Pi-calculus style concurrency 
>    of the Go runtime somehow in Ruby?

Whilst it'd be nice to have it's a very low priority - at least until there's a stable interpreter capable of passing all of TinyRb's tests.

> * Are you planning anything at all, or just having fun? (-:


Well fun is a big part of it :)

However there's also a plan. Initially I want to get a codebase that compiles, makes reasonable use of Go's idioms, and passes TinyRb's tests. Once that milestone is hit I plan to experiment with the VM's instruction set and to start fleshing out the runtime, possibly with the intention of becoming a full-blown Ruby implementation (if there's a demand).

A high priority at that stage will be getting Ruby-FFI support so I can continue my low-level coding adventures :)


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net
----
raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason