From: Mike Baranczak <mb227@...>
Date: 2002-04-07T13:50:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Is eval a code/design smell?

On Saturday, April 6, 2002, at 11:26  PM, Sean Middleditch wrote:
>
> With the current Ruby implementation, there isn't a way I know of to
> dump binary Ruby code, unless you hacked together a C extension that
> serialized the parse into whatever format - the only issue there, of
> course, is storing context and state (which is *not* easy, especially
> when only dumping parts of a program and not the whole interpreter
> state).
>
> Although, of course, a way of dumping exactly not only code, but also
> state, is very "nifty" in that you can do some fun distributed computing
> things, although I haven't found much actual *use* for it yet (but Ruby
> people are more into the fun of it anyways, right?  ~,^ ).

Well, I can think of one practical application: if the Ruby interpreter 
had the ability to store "pre-digested" scripts, it could cache 
frequently-used scripts to speed up execution. Potentially useful, 
especially when using Ruby for CGI scripts.

-MB