Re: Strongtalk and Ruby

Sorry for the short answers, I wrote a better main but google groups
send it to nothingness...

On May 7, 5:57 am, Richard <[email protected]> wrote:
> Does anyone know how suited the ruby language is to run on the
> strongtalk VM? I see that the ruby community has a couple of efforts
> to develop virtual machines (jruby and yarv), but I guess so far these
> have not lead to much of a speed increase, and it seems that they
> don't have the techniques employed in the strong talk VM. Being a
> rubyist myself, I often miss being able to specify types and have the
> feeling that ruby would benefit significantly having optional static
> typing. Hence a second argument for wanting to target the stongtalk
> VM.

The strongtalk VM could run most ruby semantics without any problem.
Much faster.
The optional static typing has nothing to do with the VM.

> One of the things that makes languages like ruby so popular is that
> they make it very easy to plug into existing C libraries. This is
> important because there are tones of existing C libraries out there
> that are non-trivial to duplicate (.e.g. openssl library), and why
> would you want to duplicate them anyway if you can produce a nice ruby/
> smalltalk interface to them. The interface to the operating system is
> C.

The strongtalk VM supports dll calls.

>
> Recently there was the question of how to get more people interested
> in the project in a way that they can contribute. From my perspective
> I would say: more documentation, more communication. They way to get
> more people up to speed is communicating the how, what and why of
> strongtalk and its VM. The few documents on the wiki seem to be good
> start, but there's lot more needed for people to get to the point
> where they can contribute. The PDF presentations on VM design are
> interesting, but without the accompanying lecture one is left without
> details.

The best documentation is the code. You'll need to get into it sooner
or later if you want to contribute anyway.
But feel free to ask questions on this mail-list if you don't
understand something.

>
> What is the situation with threads and strongtalk? Is there any chance
> that strongtalk will have any more than green threads? Does it have
> green threads (os runs one thread, vm jumps between green threads,
> uses non-blocking io)? Green threads turned out to be really cool in
> ruby:

The strongtalk VM uses native OS threads. The VM doesn't support
preemptive scheduling (not yet) or parallelism (probably never), but
all dll calls can be nonblocking.

>
>   require 'open-uri'
>
>   results = Array.new
>   results_mutex = Mutex.new
>   threads = (1..10).map do |index|
>     Thread.run do |thread|
>       result = open("http://www.google.com").read
>       results_mutex.synchronize { results << result }
>     end
>   end
>   threads.each { |thread| thread.join }
>   puts results.inspect
>
> I hope you'll excuse that little example. As maybe you can tell I much
> prefer that ruby syntax the smalltalk syntax, but what I'm asking is:
> under the covers at the VM level is pretty much all the same? Will
> inlining remove all or most of the block structures in my example?

All of them, it's the most trivial case (clean blocks).

> Would my ruby code run 10 times faster on the strongtalk VM (there's a
> network call in the middle of the example, so I guess I mean, use 10%
> of the cpu resources, not run 10 times faster. As far as I know the
> ruby interpreter doesn't do any inlining)?

This is a bad exemple, because cpu ressources needed are all spent in
the network libraries, not in the language doing high level calls. But
with a fast VM, you can do more than glue between libraries, yes.

On May 7, 7:56 pm, "Robert Shiplett" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Could io, the language, be more promising for ST than ruby ... ?
>
> Of course you might look at the ongoing PARROT work  But there are such
> interesting things going on with Io and Trans  ( iolanguage.com and
> transmuter.org ). And then there is the Alice project from Mozart/Oz ...
>
> Given that there is no good frontend to Io ( io, the language ) it would
> seem that Strongtalk could be a user-friendly face for Io, which is already
> Smalltalk friendly in so many ways.
>
> But there is also no good interface to Oz beyond Emacs ... or no ?  Could ST
> look to evolve in that direction?
>
> One interesting option is to look at the backends for Mercury - Mercury is
> pure and has no i/o and so no useful GUI ( and since someone once said that
> Smalltalk developed without regard for Prolog ... ;-)  Mozart sees itself as
> a reaction to Mercury purists ... but seems not to be as nice a fit for
> Strongtalk as Io, imho.  The thing about Mercury and Oz is that they come
> from reacting to the commercial effort at adding types to Prolog ( Turbo
> Prolog aka PDC Visual Prolog which now has parametric polymorphism at
> pdc.dk).  Types for prolog was anathema to the prolog purists,
> performance be
> danged.
>
> Of great interest to me, personally, is a marriage of XLClaire to Smalltalk
> /X  ( WebClaire is already reaching out to offer Choco to java with Palm ).
>
> I hope Strongtalk will appeal to those put off by Rebol and Curl having
> proprietary core - when I use either I immediately think of what could be
> done with Strongtalk ...

You talk about lots of languages, but I don't understand your point or
the relationship with strongtalk.


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