From: Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@...>
Date: 2010-10-06T09:19:54+09:00
Subject: Re: how can we make a ruby compiler

On 5 Oct 2010, at 22:07, William Rutiser wrote:
> As for a Ruby compiler, a useful one is very unlikely for many reasons. Now a compiler for a different language that has a distant family resemblance to Ruby may be possible but likely of not much practical use.

Lisp, Scheme, Forth and Smalltalk are all compilable so in principle Ruby should be as well. It's just not clear that there's any real gain by doing so outside of very particular applications (i.e. dominated by maths or interpretation performance bottlenecks). Moreover multicore is teasing us towards a world where all processing will be a negligible cost compared to I/O latencies and throughput, much as was the case fifty years ago.


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://feyeleanor.tel
----
raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason