From: Charles Oliver Nutter <headius@...>
Date: 2010-01-06T23:09:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby in Lisp, preLisp

On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 11:22 AM, Michal Suchanek <hramrach@centrum.cz> wrote:
> While it does not necessarily improve performance it may improve
> interoperability between the two languages. That requires a full
> interpreter of the original syntax, though. Doing that correctly for
> Ruby has proven quite difficult in other languages and I don't see any
> reason for Lisp being any different in this regard.

As someone who's been working on a Ruby impl for the past 4 years, I
can say that interpreting Ruby is not necessarily the hardest
part...what actually takes forever (almost literally forever) is
getting all the core classes behaving correctly. RubySpec and the
various test suites we use in JRuby have helped that process, but
there's still a lot of edge cases you have to use to discover.

It is for this reason that Ruby implementations seem to come out of
the woodwork but stumble a bit after leaving the gate. They can run
Ruby code very early (and often very fast). Then they have to address
the much larger task of implementing all the core classes...

- Charlie