From: Ryan Paul <segphault@...>
Date: 2004-05-13T03:43:53+09:00
Subject: Rite Implementation Idea

I just finished reading about Rite (thx to Mark for bringing it to my
attention, btw!), and I was wondering if there have been any significant
recent developments, or if there is a place where such developments are
chronicled. If ruby is in need of a new virtual machine, why not base it
on OCaml?

Ocaml has an immensely effecient virtual machine, and it also supports
generation of native binaries on many platforms. Additionally, it provides
a top-level interactive shell, and many mechanisms that vastly simplify
language creation, including a very powerful native parsing system based
on streams.

OCaml plays well with C, so using the OCaml virtual machine for Ruby would
probably make it easy to embed it in C programs, and use external C code
inside of it.

Ocaml also lets you do some really strange tricks that might give ruby
programmers more deployment options. I have seen OCaml parsers that
generate c/cpp ASTs, for instance, and I imagine that, using similar
methodology, it may eventually be possible to use an OCaml based ruby
parser to generate bytecode for java, parrot, and python VMs.