New kid on the block / introduction

[Armin Rigo]

Hi all,

On Thu, Nov 02, 2006 at 07:39:07AM -0500, Tom Novelli wrote:
> I would encourage you to go ahead with your project... If
> you succeed, it'll make Ruby a more viable language.  Elegant,
> high-level, high-performance implementations (for any language) are
> hard to find.

I suppose that now is a good time to drop a link to our project, PyPy.
That's a shameless plug - I don't pretend that this is tightly related
to Tunes, but still, it might be a concrete first step in a direction
that some people around here might find interesting.

      http://codespeak.net/pypy

PyPy gives a framework to write in Python high-level language
interpreters, and compile them in a flexible way to efficient, JIT-ing
virtual machines that run on top of C/Posix, .NET, Java, Squeak, etc.
So far we have a fully compliant Python front-end, and people are
working on Prolog and JavaScript ones.  All our front-ends are written
as "naive" interpreters.  We have C/Posix and .NET backends, with Java
and Squeak being at the draft stage.  The automatic JIT complier
generation is work in progress.

Some people considered working on a Ruby front-end, but it seems that
there are already 3 projects out there trying to write Ruby-in-Ruby.
One of these 3 projects can probably be interfaced with PyPy relatively
easily and benefit from the hard work we've already put into it (e.g.
with a straighforward translator: input the subset of Ruby that the
Ruby-in-Ruby project is written in, and output Python code that the PyPy
framework can work with).


A bientot,

Armin