Alternative Implementations

Posts tagged with "Alternative Implementations."
  • 16

    MAR
    2007

    The Ruby VM: Episode II

    We started these talks because of the excitement around the alternate implementations, like JRuby and Rubinius. How do you feel about all of these new interpreters and how do you see them affecting the official development of Ruby?

    Matz:

    Alternate implementations mean maturity of Ruby language. I'm glad for the fact. But we have never had enough number of developers for core, so I think we need more cooperation between implementations. I had a good talk about future Ruby spec. with Charles Nutter recently. I expect occasion like this more often.

    ko1:

    I think having alternatives is very important. I want to know how to implement Ruby and apply these techniques to YARV.

    In fact, implementing from scratch is very fun. YARV (official Ruby implementation) has many problems resulted from historical reasons (a biggest problem is compatibility to extension libraries).

    Have you downloaded and installed any of the other interpreters?

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  • 16

    FEB
    2007

    The Ruby VM Serial Interview

    I have really enjoyed reading Pat Eyler's Rubinius Serial Interview and Nick Sieger's spun-off JRuby Serial Interview. It's very educational to read what the developers have to say about their projects and ideas.

    The more I read though, the more I wanted the equivalent content for the official Ruby VM. I asked Matz and Koichi if they would be willing to answer questions from me and they agreed to do so. We are now ready to share their responses with the community.

    This will be a serial interview as Pat Eyler calls them. We will deliver regular episodes until I run out of good questions or Matz and Koichi get sick of me bothering them, whichever comes first. I will ask the questions in the interview, but feel free to make suggestions in the comments to this article.

    One last note: we are not promising any kind of schedule for the episodes. Matz and Koichi are heroically providing their answers in English. We want to respect how much work that is and give them all the time they need to do that. Personally, I cannot thank them enough.

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