From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2004-02-29T03:59:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Compiler [was Introducing myself and my interest in ruby]

In article <40406832.1000009@ce.chalmers.se>,
Robert Feldt  <feldt@ce.chalmers.se> wrote:
>Mark wrote:
>
>> Mark Hubbart wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> What are the chances of Cardinal having the ability to emit more than 
>>> one type of code structure for the tree it parses? Could it possibly 
>>> end up pluggable?
>>>
>>>
>> It is my intention to do exactly this.
>>
>> The plan is to write a class that outputs the correct code structure 
>> and to pass an instance of that class into the compiler.
>>
>> This is necessary since at somepoint the intermediate compiler will be 
>> enhanced so that it can accept an abstract syntax tree and generate 
>> the parrot byte code from that. So at that point it will be very 
>> useful to be able to switch from outputting intermediate compiler code 
>> to just serialising the AST.
>>
>Concerning this and the discussion about what parser to use I'd say that 
>what we really need is to decide on a common AST representation for 
>Ruby. Then we can have different parser front-ends generating the 
>correct type of AST and have different analysis and code generation 
>back-ends.

Yes, quite true.

>
>I'd say that in general though it's not the design of this or the 
>parsing that is the hard part; these things are pretty standard in 
>CS/compiler construction; the hard part is what kind of run-time support 
>is needed (and of course how you implement it) for Ruby semantics.

Right, like how do you deal with eval - it should be doable in the runtime 
lib.

>
>BTW, I have two thesis students working (they'll be starting in 3 weeks 
>actually) on Ruby compilers, one for compiling to MSIL/CIL and one for 
>compiling to llvm. Would be great if all these different Ruby compiler 
>projects could eventually share code although I think it's too early for 
>that at this point...

That's great we've got grad student slaves working on a Ruby compiler ;-)

But seriously, this sounds like a great time to coordinate efforts.  I'm 
not sure it's too early to do that. 

BTW: What's llvm?

>
>On Slang (Smalltalk subset used in Squeak) and related Ruby ideas you 
>might wanna check out
>http://www.ce.chalmers.se/~feldt/ruby/ideas/rubyvm/
>and specifically
>"SRuby - A Ruby dialect for low-level programming", 
>http://www.ce.chalmers.se/~feldt/ruby/ideas/rubyvm/sruby.pdf
>might be a bit dated now but anyway.


Yup, there's nothing new under the sun.

Phil