From: Martin DeMello <martindemello@...>
Date: 2010-10-04T02:30:56+09:00
Subject: Re: how can we make a ruby compiler

On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 1:43 PM, Philip Rhoades <phil@pricom.com.au> wrote:
>
> OK, I have been lurking but will respond now:  I have an actual existing
> application (C/C++) for population genetics simulations which I would dearly
> love to convert to Ruby.  It was originally all in C and, as a learning
> exercise, I converted parts of it to C++ - but it was such a pain . . it
> would have been so pleasant to re-write in Ruby.  However I would have to
> get resulting code converted back to C or compiled somehow to get the
> performance back to something usable.

Couldn't you just profile and write the bottlenecks in C? Also, take a
look at OCaml for ruby-like expressiveness with
reasonably-close-to-C++ performance.

> So it appears that there is still no libre software ready for prime time in
> terms of being able to write code nicely in Ruby and have some sort of
> converted run time that has near C performance . .

I believe projects like ruby2c and zenobfuscate wouldn't get you
near-C performance, since they'd still be doing a lot of what the ruby
runtime is doing under the hood.

martin