From: Dan Sugalski Date: 2002-12-19T05:15:28+09:00 Subject: Re: help -- persuade my boss to adopt ruby At 9:43 AM +0900 12/18/02, Gavin Sinclair wrote: >From: "Dan Sugalski" > > >> > >> > Ruby could be turned into a compiling language without losing its >> > dynamicity -- which provides advantages that statically typed >> > languages can't provide -- but it would take a lot of work to do. >> > It would take a year and four or five scary smart people to work >> > with Matz and do nothing else during that time. >> >> Almost. You could go compiled now, you just won't see the speedups I >> was talking about (the order of magnitude or two one). There's >> nothing about Ruby as it stands now that prevents you from generating >> a standalone executable. (And not just a wrapped interpreter, a real >> executable) Being compiled or not is orthogonal to the sort of >> dynamicity that makes the speed gains difficult. > > >Interesting. How would the following code be compiled? > > code = gets > eval code It gets compiled into a read and invocation of the compiler. For Ruby, and other languages with runtime evaluation of new code, you need to pack up the compiler with the runtime system. -- Dan --------------------------------------"it's like this"------------------- Dan Sugalski even samurai dan@sidhe.org have teddy bears and even teddy bears get drunk