From: mattmsykes@... (Matt M Sykes)
Date: 2002-04-27T04:59:06+09:00
Subject: Re: a small ruby for embedded applications

Dennis Newbold <dennisn@pe.net> wrote in message news:<Pine.GSO.3.96.1020426070724.10275B-100000@shell2>...

> On Fri, 26 Apr 2002, Matt M Sykes wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I'm putting together a stripped-down version of ruby aimed for use in
> > embedded applications.  Among other things it does not have pipes,
> > signals, forks, regular expressions, and file permissions.
> > 
> > The motivation is to have a less functional, more portable ruby for
> > driving applications which run on unusual platforms such as the
> > PlayStation 2.
> > 
> > But I just noticed something in the ruby ToDo list: Microruby.  What
> > is this?
> > 
> > --Matt
> >
> I'm sorry I don't know the answer to your specific question.  Just
> wanted to personally express alot of interest in this project.  I'm
> working on an embedded project currently, and would LOVE to be able
> to use Ruby in such an environment.  One small comment -- unless you
> are concerned about memory footprint, I feel a little uncomfortable
> with the idea of taking out the Ruby regular expression engine.  It
> facilitates alot of otherwise difficult text processing, and should
> be farily operating platform independent.  I guess the best thing
> (eventually) would be to provide a source package in which one could,
> (via a #define or configuration file or something) selectively either
> include or exclude regular expressions, and maybe some other "optional"
> Ruby features.  You might want to think about building it on top of
> a small portable embedded OS such as uCos.  Please let me know how
> your efforts are proceeding, or if I can help in any way.  Its a
> great idea.  Thanks alot.
> 
> Dennis
> 
> ---------------------------------------------
> |                                           |
> |     The way to be happy is to be good     |
> |                                           |
> ---------------------------------------------
> 

The reason for taking out the regular expressions is because I need
to have ruby statically linked into my application.  Not all operating 
systems support dynamic linking, or at least it is too much of a hassle 
to do so.

It is my understanding that statically linking to a LGPL library
requires your source code to be released or to be publically available
upon request.

The regexp library is pretty stand-alone and cross-platform, it 
even compiled on Mac Carbon without much problem, so in any case
it should be easy to add or remove the regexp class.

--Matt