From: Shashank Date <sdate@...>
Date: 2003-06-21T11:59:58+09:00
Subject: Re: reading ruby source


"Mauricio Fern�ndez" <batsman.geo@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> IMHO the source code is quite understandable, the only complicated
> files being regex.c and eval.c (where the actual evaluation of the
> AST happens).

And eval.c was the first file I tried to read ... no wonder I was
overwhelmed.

[snip]

Well, you have made very good suggestions.

> Ruby Core
>  * dln.c: wraps dlopen or the equiv. function of your platform, not very
>    interesting
>  * gc.c: quite easy to follow, of interest only if you want to know how
>     the GC works internally, but it's just mark & sweep doing "common
>     sense" things so you can safely skip it.
>  * st.c: a hash table implementation used internally by Ruby, quite
>    straightforward
>  * eval.c: much harder to read as you have to know the node types to
>    follow it; several functions are essentially a big switch() statement
>    for a node
>  * parse.y: this can help you see what different node types correspond
>    to by having a look at the grammar.
>  * regex.c: whatever, don't read it :-)

This is simply great !

>
> Built-in classes
> Take the class you like, scroll down to the Init_xxx() function and
> locate the C function that implements the method you want to study. No
> particular order required.
>
> You (I :) will sometime want to read eval.c, but it's hard to follow on
> first read.
>
> > Incidentally, when I compiled the 1.8.0 preview 2 on Windows (before
> > downloading Andy's one click installer) it generated "minruby.exe" and I
> > presume it is the "core" I mentioned earlier. Am I correct ?
>
> IIRC it's used to process the extconf.rb files in the ext/ subdirectory.

Thanks very much. This helps a lot !
-- shanko