Ever heared of XRuby before?

[Robert Dober]

Hi all,

I just stumbled above XRuby http://xruby.com/default.aspx.
I played around a little with quite some metaprogramming tricks, but I
could not make it fail.
I was quite surprised, to find a working? Ruby implementation I have
never heard of before.
Any thoughts, pointers, reviews would be appreciated.

Cheers
Robert


--=20
Ne baisse jamais la t=EAte, tu ne verrais plus les =E9toiles.

Robert Dober

 

[Charles Oliver Nutter]

XRuby was started by yawl and continued by dreamhead at about the same
time JRuby created, but JRuby had only an interpreter then (I think) when XRuby released its ruby to java bytecode compiler.

This is basically true. JRuby's compiler was not actually completed and
released until 2008, though some experimentation had happened earlier. I
spoke with XRuby guys frequently in 2006 and 2007, and we generally
agreed that while XRuby had already a much better compiler, JRuby's
runtime and core classes were further along. As a result of JRuby's core
classes being more "correct", we were able to run Rails in 2006, which
is largely why Sun and Thoughtworks became so interested in JRuby during
late 2006 and early 2007.

I still believe XRuby has something valuable the community could really
use: perhaps the closest-to-correct Antlr grammar for Ruby yet created.
I'd love for others to take it over and bring it to completion.

- Charlie

 

[Robert Dober]

This is basically true. JRuby's compiler was not actually completed and
released until 2008, though some experimentation had happened earlier. I
spoke with XRuby guys frequently in 2006 and 2007, and we generally agree= d
that while XRuby had already a much better compiler, JRuby's runtime and
core classes were further along. As a result of JRuby's core classes bein= g
more "correct", we were able to run Rails in 2006, which is largely why S= un
and Thoughtworks became so interested in JRuby during late 2006 and early
2007.

I still believe XRuby has something valuable the community could really u= se:
perhaps the closest-to-correct Antlr grammar for Ruby yet created. I'd lo= ve
for others to take it over and bring it to completion.

Thanx folks I was really impressed by the performance of XRuby.
By looking at the Hacking guide it seems like
an MRI Ruby running on Java instead of C. Big difference would be that
there is not an AST to be interpreted but a Java program that is
compiled from Ruby and which implements the dynamic features of Ruby
as an interpreter. Right?
Cheers
Robert

--=20
Ne baisse jamais la t=EAte, tu ne verrais plus les =E9toiles.

Robert Dober

 

[Charles Oliver Nutter]

Thanx folks I was really impressed by the performance of XRuby.
By looking at the Hacking guide it seems like
an MRI Ruby running on Java instead of C. Big difference would be that
there is not an AST to be interpreted but a Java program that is
compiled from Ruby and which implements the dynamic features of Ruby
as an interpreter. Right?

XRuby is really far behind in supporting all of the more unusual
features of Ruby, and with JRuby's compiler I believe we're faster on
almost all the usual cases now. JRuby also has an ahead-of-time
compiler, so you can just create .class files to ship.

Also, XRuby does nothing to integrate with Java at present, where JRuby
provides pretty solid 2-way integration. I'm sure there's more we can
learn from XRuby codebase, but most of the main features are already
superceded by JRuby.

Perhaps we need a JRuby hacking guide? It's not very difficult to follow.

- Charlie