Is the Ruby executable written in C?

[Steve Litt]

Hi all,

Is the Ruby executable written in C?

Thanks

SteveT

Steve Litt
http://www.troubleshooters.com
(e-mail address removed)

 

[James Edward Gray II]

Hi all,

Is the Ruby executable written in C?

In a word: Yes.

James Edward Gray II

 

[Rich Morin]

In a word: Yes.

modulo JRuby

 

[Chad Perrin]

The Perl source is worse.

According to Nat Torkington, the Perl source is "an interconnected mass
of livers and pancreas and lungs and little sharp pointy things and the
occasional exploding kidney."

 

[James Britt]

It seems to be written in a version of C that I found a little difficult
to read. It uses old K&R style function declarations, and uses macros
in places I'm not used to seeing them. Honestly, I'd love to spend some
time hacking the VM, but it looks prohibitively difficult. Maybe
someone will enlighten me.

Might be an acquired taste. I've not done any regular C coding in many
years, (which may have helped here) but when crawling through the Ruby
source some years back, in preparation for a book, I found it fairly
easy to get used to the naming and coding conventions and figure things
out. It was a great help when trying to determine if some class or
method had any potentially unexpected behavior that was not documented,
or not documented correctly.

(I realize it may seem pretty obvious to say that the source code is a
good place to look for this information, the point being that it is
quite readable.)


James


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