RE: Strongtalk and Ruby

Ruby on Strongtalk is a definite interest of mine. So far I've seen no
reason why this wouldn't be a match made in heaven, but I've only dabbled so
far.

Oh, and BTW, JRuby has achieved speeds better than that of the native Ruby
interpreter when running Rails apps, according to Charles Nutter.

Ted Neward
Java, .NET, XML Services
Consulting, Teaching, Speaking, Writing
http://www.tedneward.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] [mailto:strongtalk-
> [email protected]] On Behalf Of Richard
> Sent: Sunday, May 06, 2007 8:57 PM
> To: Strongtalk-general
> Subject: Strongtalk and Ruby
> 
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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:
> 
>   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?
> 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)?
> 
> 
> > 
> No virus found in this incoming message.
> Checked by AVG Free Edition.
> Version: 7.5.467 / Virus Database: 269.6.4/790 - Release Date: 5/5/2007
> 10:34 AM
> 

No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition. 
Version: 7.5.467 / Virus Database: 269.6.5/793 - Release Date: 5/7/2007 2:55
PM
 


--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Strongtalk-general" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/strongtalk-general?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---