From: Robert Feldt <feldt@...>
Date: 2004-02-29T15:54:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Compiler [was Introducing myself and my interest in ruby]

Phil Tomson wrote:

>>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.
>>    
>>
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>Yes, quite true.
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>>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.
>>    
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>Right, like how do you deal with eval - it should be doable in the runtime 
>lib.
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Yes, but also the semantics of normal class creation, method additions 
etc, what makes Ruby Ruby... ;)

>>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...
>>    
>>
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>That's great we've got grad student slaves working on a Ruby compiler ;-)
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They're mid-level thesis so it's two 10 week projects but yes, basically 
you're right ;). The goal is to get two prototypes that covers some 
small part of Ruby to show if/how it's feasible to do it. Based on that 
one can decide how to proceed.

>But seriously, this sounds like a great time to coordinate efforts.  I'm 
>not sure it's too early to do that. 
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Coordinate by creating common AST format I'd say, the rest is not clear 
how much overlap it's going to be imho.

>BTW: What's llvm?
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http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/
Compiler infrastructure with abstract assembly language which they can 
generate different machine codes from => we can abstract away from 
back-end; if we just generate llvm assembly they take care of the 
CPU-specific stuff.

/Robert