What is YARV?

[Jim]

I see it's a VM for Ruby, but what does that mean and what is it good
for?

 

[Wilson Bilkovich]

I see it's a VM for Ruby, but what does that mean and what is it good
for?

Here's a poster from last year that may help explain what it's all about:
http://www.atdot.net/~ko1/tmp/OOPSLA05_poster.pdf

 

[David Vallner]

Put shortly, it's a Rubyists (for given values of Rubyist, notably includin=
g=20
me) biggest dream. If it works out, Ruby scripts will run Damn Fast compare=
d=20
to how they do now. They could also be distributable in a compact wordcode=
=20
form, for all the good and bad that brings.

<rant>
i also silently hope for YARV to run / compile in a mode without support fo=
r=20
string-based eval, the mild deprecation of that horrible, completely=20
unoptimizable language feature in the core / stdlib in favour of the=20
multitude of much cleaner reflection and metaprogramming present in Ruby, s=
o=20
that there's at least a remote hope of such wonders like clean blocks that=
=20
don't prevent their entire scope from being GCed just because the interpret=
er=20
can't tell whether it will be used. Etc.
</rant>

David Vallner

D=C5=88a Sobota 04 Febru=C3=A1r 2006 22:53 Jim nap=C3=ADsal: