[lnkForumImage]
TotalShareware - Download Free Software
Confronta i prezzi di migliaia di prodotti.
Asp Forum
 Home | Login | Register | Search 


 

Forums >

comp.lang.ruby

Porting Ruby: 1.8 or 1.9?

Jay Levitt

11/12/2007 12:03:00 AM

I've got a consulting gig at the moment, working on Stratus fault-tolerant
servers, and I don't have much excuse to play with Ruby. So I thought
"Wouldn't it be fun to try porting Ruby to Stratus?"

(Stratus servers - I can't really call them "minicomputers" anymore - run a
proprietary operating system called VOS. It's written by some of the same
people who wrote Multics, and shares many of its features. Two decades
ago, there wasn't even a C compiler available. In recent years, they've
made some large strides toward portability, switching to a Xeon-based
platform, with POSIX.1 compliance built in, and gcc, perl5, SAMBA, and
other mainstays available.)

This would really be a just-for-fun project, for some strange values of
"fun". The VOS community is tiny and shrinking, and the types of businesses
still running VOS are not likely to adopt Ruby - last I heard, the biggest
codebases were in COBOL and PL/I in that order. Even Stratus's own
marketing materials talk about "staying on the VOS platform if you choose
to do so" and migrating off it "as painlessly as possible". It's far from
obsolete, but neither is it the future.

So, in all likelihood, the port wouldn't be used. I just wanna see if I
can build it at all, and keep Ruby on my mind. Disabling wide swaths of
functionality isn't a big deal (e.g. threads).

Can anbody recommend which tree - 1.8 or 1.9 - is easier to port to oddball
systems? Anyone done that lately? I seem to remember hearing about Ruby
running on a phone.

--
Jay Levitt |
Boston, MA | My character doesn't like it when they
Faster: jay at jay dot fm | cry or shout or hit.
http://... | - Kristoffer
3 Answers

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

11/12/2007 12:45:00 AM

0

Jay Levitt wrote:
> I've got a consulting gig at the moment, working on Stratus fault-tolerant
> servers, and I don't have much excuse to play with Ruby. So I thought
> "Wouldn't it be fun to try porting Ruby to Stratus?"
>
> (Stratus servers - I can't really call them "minicomputers" anymore - run a
> proprietary operating system called VOS. It's written by some of the same
> people who wrote Multics, and shares many of its features. Two decades
> ago, there wasn't even a C compiler available. In recent years, they've
> made some large strides toward portability, switching to a Xeon-based
> platform, with POSIX.1 compliance built in, and gcc, perl5, SAMBA, and
> other mainstays available.)
>
> This would really be a just-for-fun project, for some strange values of
> "fun". The VOS community is tiny and shrinking, and the types of businesses
> still running VOS are not likely to adopt Ruby - last I heard, the biggest
> codebases were in COBOL and PL/I in that order. Even Stratus's own
> marketing materials talk about "staying on the VOS platform if you choose
> to do so" and migrating off it "as painlessly as possible". It's far from
> obsolete, but neither is it the future.
>
> So, in all likelihood, the port wouldn't be used. I just wanna see if I
> can build it at all, and keep Ruby on my mind. Disabling wide swaths of
> functionality isn't a big deal (e.g. threads).
>
> Can anbody recommend which tree - 1.8 or 1.9 - is easier to port to oddball
> systems? Anyone done that lately? I seem to remember hearing about Ruby
> running on a phone.

Well, if you've got GCC, either one should be "easily ported". But 1.8
has threads and a scheduler built into the language, while 1.9 has to
have native OS threads available. So if you *want* threads, go with 1.8.

Then again, if it's all about fun, why not write a Ruby 1.9 interpreter
from scratch in PL/I?

<ducking>
>


Jay Levitt

11/12/2007 1:39:00 AM

0

On Sun, 11 Nov 2007 19:45:02 -0500, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> Well, if you've got GCC, either one should be "easily ported". But 1.8
> has threads and a scheduler built into the language, while 1.9 has to
> have native OS threads available. So if you *want* threads, go with 1.8.

Ah, interesting. Does 1.9 have to have native threads just to run? Or
only if you want to use threads from the application?

Actually, threads were probably a bad example, since (unless there are some
oddities in VOS's POSIX pthread implementation) I imagine they'll work OK.

I was more wondering if, say, 1.9 used a more modern autoconf, or anything
like that. One of the hardest things about porting apps to VOS is
apparently the autoconf scripts; they generally either (a) don't have the
notion of an "executable" suffix (a la .EXE), or (b) they do, but they
don't use it consistently - e.g. it works for native Windows but not for
the whole POSIX build path.

When I tried to see if 1.8.6 would "just build", that was the first thing I
ran into; VOS executables end in .pm, but Ruby's autoconf script ignores
that for all the various tests it runs once it finds gcc. (Worse, shell
scripts like autoconf are the single slowest thing you can run in VOS;
"fork" really creates a whole new login process, which takes about half a
second, so just getting through a configure script can take an hour or
more.)

Also, if Ruby assumes that x86 = little-endian, I've got some work to do.

> Then again, if it's all about fun, why not write a Ruby 1.9 interpreter
> from scratch in PL/I?

My cardiologist tells me that I should try not to have too much fun at
one time.

--
Jay Levitt |
Boston, MA | My character doesn't like it when they
Faster: jay at jay dot fm | cry or shout or hit.
http://... | - Kristoffer

Jay Levitt

11/13/2007 3:21:00 AM

0

On Sun, 11 Nov 2007 19:03:08 -0500, Jay Levitt wrote:

> Can anbody recommend which tree - 1.8 or 1.9 - is easier to port to oddball
> systems? Anyone done that lately? I seem to remember hearing about Ruby
> running on a phone.

Answer my own question and give a tip to Googlers: For the moment, anyway,
Ruby 1.9 requires Ruby to build itself. So that'd be a bad idea.

--
Jay Levitt |
Boston, MA | My character doesn't like it when they
Faster: jay at jay dot fm | cry or shout or hit.
http://... | - Kristoffer