Ruby on the Smalltalk VM?

[Vincent Foley]

Hi all,

I just wanted to know if somebody had informations concerning the post
made by a guy (Peter Suk?) about implementing Ruby on top of a
Smalltalk VM? Is there a project page? A mailing list? I would
really like to know, because as far as languages go, I prefer Ruby, but
the whole Smalltalk environment is just the best thing I've used. I
would like to know if that project just sort of died out after a rather
interesting discussion or if there is actual development.

Thanks,

Vincent

 

[Ilmari Heikkinen]

ma, 2005-04-25 kello 08:34, Vincent Foley kirjoitti:

Hi all,

I just wanted to know if somebody had informations concerning the post
made by a guy (Peter Suk?) about implementing Ruby on top of a
Smalltalk VM? Is there a project page? A mailing list?

http://www.alumina-vm.org/AluminaWiki/

That seems to be the project page.

 

[Peter Suk]

Hi all,

I just wanted to know if somebody had informations concerning the post
made by a guy (Peter Suk?) about implementing Ruby on top of a
Smalltalk VM? Is there a project page? A mailing list? I would
really like to know, because as far as languages go, I prefer Ruby, but
the whole Smalltalk environment is just the best thing I've used. I
would like to know if that project just sort of died out after a rather
interesting discussion or if there is actual development.

Active development. We are currently working on a RubyParserInRuby,
which seems quite close.
Wiki: http://www.alumina-vm.org/AluminaWiki/ Not much up there, and
it's a bit behind where we actually are.

There is also a Rubyforge site, but not much on there yet.


--Peter

 

[Peter Suk]

Hi all,

I just wanted to know if somebody had informations concerning the post
made by a guy (Peter Suk?) about implementing Ruby on top of a
Smalltalk VM? Is there a project page? A mailing list? I would
really like to know, because as far as languages go, I prefer Ruby, but
the whole Smalltalk environment is just the best thing I've used.

Vincent,

A major part of the motivation for this project is to have something
like the Refactoring Browser, but Ruby style.

(Incidentally, Refactoring in Ruby or any other environment that can
dynamically alter its own configuration is always done on a *pragmatic*
basis, since we can always code a counterexample to a Refactoring's
validity that we can use to solve the Halting Problem. Left as an
exercise for you sharp ones out there.)

--Peter

 

[pat eyler]

Vincent,

A major part of the motivation for this project is to have something
like the Refactoring Browser, but Ruby style.

Are you aware of the Ruby Refactoring Browser?

http://www.kmc.gr.jp/proj/rrb/index-en.html

 

[Curt Hibbs]

Are you aware of the Ruby Refactoring Browser?

http://www.kmc.gr.jp/proj/rrb/index-en.html

This initial effort was quite laudable, but the project seems to have
been abandoned, and its not particularly useful in its current state.

Curt

 

[Lothar Scholz]

Hello Curt,
CH> This initial effort was quite laudable, but the project seems to have
CH> been abandoned, and its not particularly useful in its current state.

Yes. It would be nice if the maintainer could write a few lines if the
project was abandoned because of a lack of time or if he run into some
to difficult to solve problems.

I've put Mr. OHBAYASHI Ippei into the BCC field of this reply and therefore
changed the subject of the message.

 

[Peter Suk]

This initial effort was quite laudable, but the project seems to have
been abandoned, and its not particularly useful in its current state.

Whereas the Smalltalk Refactoring Browser is extremely powerful, and
prompts people like Kent Beck to say that it allows them to refactor an
order of magnitude faster which in turn allows an entirely new style of
programming which would otherwise be impractical.

Current Refactoring tools in Ruby are hampered by obstructed access to
the meta-level. (Which is good in Ruby, but not quite up to the level
of Smalltalk or Lisp.) Also needed is an easy to use syntax-directed
transformation engine -- this is the true heart of the Smalltalk
Refactoring Browser.

This is one of my original motivations for putting Ruby on top of a
Smalltalk-like meta-Ruby layer. For this, you need something like the
Smalltalk VM, which has no syntax and very little meta-level semantics
built into it. As a result, almost the entire meta-level will be
ordinary Ruby objects, as fully extendable by a Ruby programmer in Ruby
as an ordinary piece of application code.

--Peter