To Sum Up...
Patrick Logan calls a spade a spade:
Seriously, Ruby is in dire need of a decent implementation. The JVM and the CLR are fine for what they are, old legacy. But Ruby needs its own *modern* implementation.
I'd love to have a Ruby implementation on our VM. The difficulty is in figuring out a business model that would support doing the investment.
Comments
Biz model
[bigz] October 25, 2006 18:22:11.570
Implement Ruby in your VM and then write a book about it which includes tons of info about the language as well as how to deploy Ruby using your VM for common applications. Sell book. Profit! ( yeah, probably wouldn't work in real life.. but it's an idea, anyway :) )
[] October 25, 2006 18:38:04.501
The Ruby community should look at adopting the Strongtalk VM.
Strongtalk?
[murphee (http://jroller.com/page/murphee)] October 25, 2006 19:48:59.139
@[]: Porting Ruby to a 10 year old, half finished codebase that's currently Windows only isn't going to help them too much, I'd say. Not that I'm saying anything against Strongtalk, but it's not a funded, active project right now. It's one thing to have a codebase, and another to have paid engineers, a QA department, people who'll port it to all platforms that Ruby supports, etc.
BTW: see these threads on strongtalk-general:
On whether Continuations are possible:
http://groups.google.com/group/strongtalk-general/browse_thread/thread/e346b074a18c91d1/25bf91b545336321?lnk=gst&q=Seaside&rnum=2#25bf91b545336321
Strongtalk uses native threads:
http://groups.google.com/group/strongtalk-general/browse_thread/thread/e346b074a18c91d1/aa539308b2d36ef1?lnk=gst&q=threads&rnum=1#aa539308b2d36ef1
Strongtalk has neither continuations nor is it based on green threads. Again: I'm not saying this is cannot be solved, but that's the state of the art. Feel free to correct me, if this is wrong or I misunderstood something.
[] October 26, 2006 9:14:48.983
Ruby is dropping continuations and green threads, so that's no problem.
The current state of the codebase and being stuck on Windows is, but if the Ruby VM is going to be rewritten anyway, why not start with a VM that is still the state of the art even after 10 years.
Just do it
[Jason Dufair] October 26, 2006 13:53:24.095
Seems like it would not be a very big investment. You guys should just take the risk.
What Jason said
[Avi Bryant] October 26, 2006 20:04:25.805
Just do it. Don't worry about productizing it, just put it out there as a demo and let people benchmark it compared to C Ruby, JVM Ruby, CLR Ruby, and draw their own conclusions (we all know it'll clean the floor with all of the above). The Ruby community is exceedingly vocal and influential; do you think you can buy that kind of advertising?