Asp Forum - Ruby VM Projects

Mark Wassell

10/9/2004 8:50:00 PM

There are a number of RubyVM machine projects some just starting, some
'almost' there, some very active and some dormant. See
http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?VirtualMach...

I am wondering if this is one area of Ruby that requires some form of
coordination. I appreciate that this isn't the way that Ruby projects are
handled in general but perhaps this can be an exception, at least until we
get one VM project through the gate.

Just a thought.

Cheers

Mark

22 Answers

David Ross

10/9/2004 9:07:00 PM

Hal E. Fulton

10/9/2004 9:16:00 PM

Mark Wassell wrote:
> There are a number of RubyVM machine projects some just starting, some
> 'almost' there, some very active and some dormant. See
> http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?VirtualMach...
>
> I am wondering if this is one area of Ruby that requires some form of
> coordination. I appreciate that this isn't the way that Ruby projects are
> handled in general but perhaps this can be an exception, at least until we
> get one VM project through the gate.

I sympathize with what you're saying, but there are problems with it.

- There is no one philosophy of how a VM ought to be done. Thus there is
a strong tendency for people to say, "I don't like that approach, I'll
make my own."
- Matz wants to use "his own" VM, which may or may not be YARV or some
existing project, but *will* be tailored specifically to Ruby.
- Matz, of course, has many subprojects and is very busy.
- Some projects target other VMs: Parrot, JVM, LLVM?, .NET, and so on. Even
when Matz writes/picks the One True VM, these other projects won't go away
or be invalidated.

Having said that: Synergy is a great thing. If people can somehow cooperate
and focus their efforts, that's great. Ultimately Matz's call I guess.

Hal

Eric Hodel

10/9/2004 10:51:00 PM

On Oct 9, 2004, at 2:06 PM, David Ross wrote:

> Not to sound mean, but its more of a phase people(community) go
> through. Just like the Ruby Text editor phase we had 6 months ago. I
> guess its time for a new fad,VM creation.

No, people want the son-shi award.

--
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David Ross

10/9/2004 10:57:00 PM

Eric Hodel wrote:

> On Oct 9, 2004, at 2:06 PM, David Ross wrote:
>
>> Not to sound mean, but its more of a phase people(community) go
>> through. Just like the Ruby Text editor phase we had 6 months ago. I
>> guess its time for a new fad,VM creation.
>
>
> No, people want the son-shi award.
>
I seriously don't see why people are wanting to recreate the wheel, its
not even being recreated in C. I was looking at all the VMs people were
working on, which most are being built on top of another VM. This is
very wasteful. I can see if they were creating a project because of the
license, or perhaps the code was really bad. These projects are getting
to be really halarious to me.

--dross

gabriele renzi

10/10/2004 1:07:00 AM

Mark Wassell ha scritto:

> There are a number of RubyVM machine projects some just starting, some
> 'almost' there, some very active and some dormant. See
> http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?VirtualMach...
>
> I am wondering if this is one area of Ruby that requires some form of
> coordination. I appreciate that this isn't the way that Ruby projects are
> handled in general but perhaps this can be an exception, at least until we
> get one VM project through the gate.
>
> Just a thought.
>

some points to think about:
- some things on that page are hust suggestions so the list gets smaller
- some are old things already abandonware
- some things are actually shared (i.e. I guess they're not rewriting
the parser by themselve)
- maybe there is interaction :) At least you can find koichi sasada from
yarv and alexander kellet from rubydium on #ruby-lang ;) (and I think
some other )

anyway, if there was a comp.lang.ruby.raving.about.new.vms with all
those hackers I'd love to subscribe :)

Alexander Kellett

10/10/2004 4:28:00 AM

On Sun, Oct 10, 2004 at 07:56:54AM +0900, David Ross wrote:
> I seriously don't see why people are wanting to recreate the wheel, its
> not even being recreated in C. I was looking at all the VMs people were
> working on, which most are being built on top of another VM. This is
> very wasteful. I can see if they were creating a project because of the
> license, or perhaps the code was really bad. These projects are getting
> to be really halarious to me.

well neither of the two projects that appear
to be making the most progress fast are based
on a preexisting vm - yarv and my own project
of course :P

not sure i understand what you mean by recreate
the wheel. there is no overlap between the current
set of ruby vm projects that i can see.

some target .net for interoperability reasons,
one parrot for the same reasons (i hope / think),
and the remaining two that i know of (not sure how
bytecoderuby is going admittedly?) are two *very*
different approaches.

sorry, but i just don't see any wheel thats being
recreated, however, i do see recreation on a
wheel that is in dire need of being spun...

cheers,
Alex

Alexander Kellett

10/10/2004 4:33:00 AM

On Sun, Oct 10, 2004 at 10:09:51AM +0900, gabriele renzi wrote:
> some points to think about:
> - some things are actually shared (i.e. I guess they're not rewriting
> the parser by themselve)

nod. i'm re-using robert feldt's ruth parser for example.
and robert feldt's later project ripper is used by cardinal
from what i remember (though i'd love to be whacked with a
cluebat if i'm wrong here i didn't really look enough at
the code base yet)

writing parser frameworks sure is interesting but its a
heck of a tangent and there are other people i know that
are far better than me at it anyway ;)

> anyway, if there was a comp.lang.ruby.raving.about.new.vms with all
> those hackers I'd love to subscribe :)

hehe :)

i'm not a news:/ sort of person unfortunately so if
its ever created, i hope there's a bi-di gateway :P

mvg,
Alex

Alexander Kellett

10/10/2004 5:00:00 AM

On Sun, Oct 10, 2004 at 05:54:41AM +0900, Mark Wassell wrote:
> There are a number of RubyVM machine projects some just starting, some
> 'almost' there, some very active and some dormant. See
> http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?VirtualMach...
>
> I am wondering if this is one area of Ruby that requires some form of
> coordination. I appreciate that this isn't the way that Ruby projects are
> handled in general but perhaps this can be an exception, at least until we
> get one VM project through the gate.

just based on my own experience and my own development model /
architecture. there is no way on earth that i could work together
with someone else at this stage of development. the core is just
plain tiny, and it would be extremely difficult to coordinate a
team of people to work on it, i'm not certain it would be a good
thing in any case as i don't really believe that it requires a
team in any case... admittedly in a few months the core library
layer will be finished and the String / Interger / Array classes
will all need to be written (in ruby of course :)), i guess this
work could be done by a team.

in any case, as hal and gabriele pointed out, the main reason
for the variety of projects is that they just don't overlap :)

cheers,
Alex

Eric Hodel

10/10/2004 7:04:00 AM

David Ross (dross@code-exec.net) wrote:

> Eric Hodel wrote:
>
> >On Oct 9, 2004, at 2:06 PM, David Ross wrote:
> >
> >>Not to sound mean, but its more of a phase people(community) go
> >>through. Just like the Ruby Text editor phase we had 6 months ago. I
> >>guess its time for a new fad,VM creation.
> >
> >
> >No, people want the son-shi award.
> >
> I seriously don't see why people are wanting to recreate the wheel,

The wheel is broken. matz says so, and if you look at eval.c, you'll
see why. Ruby needs a new interpreter.

> its not even being recreated in C.

There are few compelling reasons to use C. There are few non-Japanese
speaking Ruby interpreter hackers (I mean eval.c) because it is very
difficult to get over the language barrier. I believe matz has said
that eval.c contains "black magic".

> I was looking at all the VMs people were working on, which most are
> being built on top of another VM. This is very wasteful.

I don't see how this is wasteful. Writing a VM takes a lot of work, to
be fast, and there are plenty of fast VMs out there. Furthermore, its
not very fun.

Writing an interpreter in Ruby that can output to
#{VM_or_language_of_choice} is much better for everybody because it
lowers the barrier to entry for future interpreter hackers/tweakers/etc.

> I can see if they were creating a project because of the license, or
> perhaps the code was really bad. These projects are getting to be
> really halarious to me.

People are writing interpreters because it is a Hard Thing To Do.
(Count up all the nodes types in Ruby's AST, you'll see why its hard.)
This difficulty makes it fun (very, very fun, I know from experience).

Look at how many web frameworks Ruby has of varying complexity, or how
many template tools. Look at any other scripting language to see how
many different tools to do whatever you want there are. Many are of
equal quality and similar licenses, but nobody's knocking them for
duplicate effort.

PS: If you don't have anything nice to say...

--
Eric Hodel - drbrain@segment7.net - http://se...
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mark sparshatt

10/10/2004 8:37:00 AM

Alexander Kellett wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 10, 2004 at 10:09:51AM +0900, gabriele renzi wrote:
>
>>some points to think about:
>>- some things are actually shared (i.e. I guess they're not rewriting
>>the parser by themselve)
>
>
> nod. i'm re-using robert feldt's ruth parser for example.
> and robert feldt's later project ripper is used by cardinal
> from what i remember (though i'd love to be whacked with a
> cluebat if i'm wrong here i didn't really look enough at
> the code base yet)
>

You're right that Cardinal uses Ripper as it's parsing component, but it
was written by Minero Aoki, rather than Robert Feldt.

--
Mark Sparshatt

comp.lang.ruby

Ruby VM Projects

Mark Wassell

David Ross

Hal E. Fulton

Eric Hodel

David Ross

gabriele renzi

Alexander Kellett

Alexander Kellett

Alexander Kellett

Eric Hodel

mark sparshatt

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