From: "Paul E.C. Melis" Date: 2002-07-26T19:31:22+09:00 Subject: Re: Opinion on Ruby maturity, the missing things "John Carter" wrote in message news:Pine.LNX.4.44.0207261037400.11795-100000@parore... > On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, Paul E.C. Melis wrote: > > > 2) there's no (bytecode) compiler. > > > > Commerical applications will not use Ruby until there's a way to guard Ruby > > code from being used by others. The possibility of compiling scripts to > > bytecode would be a great leap forward in this respect. Actually, I should have been clearer on the view I had of Ruby embedded in an application and a bunch of precompiled Ruby scripts coming with the app. > > Is that why no one uses Java? You can decompile the .jar files at > will.... > Sure, but that won't make them very useful without the original variable names and lack of documentation, to name a few. It's not about counteracting reverse-engineering, it's about keeping others from simply stealing your code, which is darn easy when it's just sitting there unprotected in a text file. > I have yet to see a perl app that is shipped only in bytecode form, yet > Perl is weirder than Ruby and more popular with the PHB's You probably wouldn't have mentioned this if I had been clearer in the original post. I have _never_ seen an application that has Perl embedded in it. Perl scripts are distributed frequently with apps, but they are almost always stand-alone or use a pipe or socket to talk to the main application. And I have also never seen a bytecode compiled version of Perl script, but this should change with version 6 and Parrot coming up. Regards, Paul