Why all of this ?
Damien Cassou
I'm a bit late but still would like to know why it is interesting to
run Ruby on a Smalltalk VM. Is it for performance reasons ?
Thank you
Joke: Smalltalk.rb sounds to me as implementing something Smalltalk
related in Ruby. But what you want to do, if I understand correctly, is
implementing something Ruby related on top of Smalltalk. I understood
you were writing Ruby code to translate, but that sounds like
implementation details :-) So why not Ruby.st ?
Avi Bryant
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm a bit late but still would like to know why it is interesting to
> run Ruby on a Smalltalk VM. Is it for performance reasons ?
To begin with, yes. And for plenty of people that's motivation enough.
Beyond that, though: the only way Ruby achieves even the performance
it gets now is by implementing the bulk of the standard library in C.
With a more sophisticated VM, we could see a Smalltalk-style core
library, where 90% of it was implemented in the language itself and
only a few crucial primitives drop down to the C level, and still
retain acceptable performance. To me, that's more interesting than
the pure performance.
Avi
Dane Jensen
> I'm a bit late but still would like to know why it is interesting to
> run Ruby on a Smalltalk VM. Is it for performance reasons ?
Performance is one reason. The various Smalltalk VMs have a few
decades of work at getting a dynamic OO language to run really really
well.
Another is that the Smalltalk IDE is simply incredible, and being
able to develop Ruby with those same tools would be a great boon.
A third is that Smalltalk is mostly written in Smalltalk, save for a
small set of VM-level primitives. This kind of "turtles all the way
down" is really fascinating to work in and contrast to other
languages that have a large core written in C (as are Ruby's core
classes, which has complications such as overriding methods on a
core classes like Array can be problematic).
> Joke: Smalltalk.rb sounds to me as implementing something Smalltalk
> related in Ruby. But what you want to do, if I understand
> correctly, is
> implementing something Ruby related on top of Smalltalk. I understood
> you were writing Ruby code to translate, but that sounds like
> implementation details :-) So why not Ruby.st ?
Smalltalk.rb is needed to translate Ruby into Smalltalk. Ruby.st
comes later when we need to then run that translated code in
Smalltalk ;)
-Dane
Dane Jensen
On Nov 13, 2006, at 11:32 PM, Damien Cassou wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm a bit late but still would like to know why it is interesting to
> run Ruby on a Smalltalk VM. Is it for performance reasons ?
Damien-
I knew your name sounded familiar, I guessed from ruby-talk and was
wrong, looks like it's squeak-dev. So nevermind my prior preaching to
the choir :).
From the standpoint of someone that works in Ruby all day and hacks
around in Smalltalk in his spare time, I hope this helps bring some
of the really awesome tools available in Smalltalk to Ruby, and
perhaps nudge more Rubyists towards Smalltalk.
-Dane
(As a side-note, in the Portland Smalltalk user group, about 50
percent of our members come from the Ruby community. There's
definitely a fair bit of interest in Smalltalk in Ruby's corner of
the universe.)
Avi Bryant
> (As a side-note, in the Portland Smalltalk user group, about 50
> percent of our members come from the Ruby community.
Interesting. How many are you in total?
Avi
Topher Cyll
meetings (before I moved), I have to say the ability to save and load
a Ruby image would be huge win too.
Hello from Cambridge, Dane!
Toph
On 11/14/06, Dane Jensen <ca...@fastmail.fm> wrote:
>
>
Dane Jensen
As of this morning, 30 people are on the pdx.st mailing list[1], with
roughly 11 people I recognize from the pdx.rb list.
Our meetings are around ten people.
-Dane