New kid on the block / introduction

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

Armin Rigo wrote:
> 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.

Sadly, I know zero Python. I'm actually a Perl programmer who is
migrating to Ruby.

> 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.

I don't think there are actually three *viable* projects -- it's more
like one project with a couple of different facets. For the current Ruby
language, there's one project (at Sun) to run Ruby on the Java VM, at
Microsoft there are two projects integrating Ruby into .NET/CLR, and the
other one -- "Ruby in Ruby" is Rubinius.

The future Ruby -- beyond 1.8 -- is only one project. The virtual
machine is called YARV.

Cardinal (Ruby on the Parrot Virtual Machine) and Carbone (Ruby on a
vmgen virtual machine) both appear to be dead.

> 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).

Which project is this? Rubinius?