Announcing Beta Release of GP Ruby.NET Compiler

ruby-talk
1

We are pleased to announce the preliminary Beta release of the Gardens Point
Ruby.NET compiler. Note: this is not just a Ruby/.NET bridge, nor a Ruby
Interpreter implemented on .NET, but a true .NET compiler. The compiler can
be used to statically compile a Ruby source file into a verifiable .NET v2.0
assembly or it can be used to directly execute a Ruby source file (compile,
load and execute). Our implementation is not yet fully complete, but it is
the only Ruby compiler that we know of for either the .NET or JVM platforms
that is able to pass all 871 tests in the samples/test.rb installation test
suite of Ruby 1.8.2.

Complete source code of our system can be downloaded from:
http://plas.fit.qut.edu.au/Ruby.NET

Please note, that we have so far made no attempt to optimize the performance
of our system or to provide any support for interoperability with .NET
programs written in other languages. We have chosen instead to initially
focus on the challenging task of achieving complete semantic compatibility
with the standard Ruby interpreter. Once this is achieved we will move on to
those other challenges.

To achieve full semantic compatibility, many sections of our runtime library
implementation mirrors the structure of the Ruby 1.8.2 interpreter code. We
thank Matz and his colleagues for making their source code available under
such a liberal license that enables works such as ours. We similarly, make
our system freely available under a similarly liberal open-source license.

We are seeking keen Ruby and .NET programmers to assist with further testing
and development (see our web site for further details).

We look forward to your feedback ...

Cheers, Wayne.
(For the GP Ruby.NET development team).

···

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Wayne Kelly Senior Lecturer
Email: w.kelly@qut.edu.au School of Software Engineering and DC
Phone: +61 7 3864 9336 Faculty of Information Technology
Fax: +61 7 3864 9390 Queensland University of Technology

2

Wayne Kelly wrote:

We are pleased to announce the preliminary Beta release of the Gardens
Point
Ruby.NET compiler. Note: this is not just a Ruby/.NET bridge, nor a Ruby
Interpreter implemented on .NET, but a true .NET compiler.

Complete source code of our system can be downloaded from:
http://plas.fit.qut.edu.au/Ruby.NET

WOW!!

This is great news!

It also looks like you have some Microsoft sponsorship.

The corporate world is going to love this! :slight_smile:

This is going to be a nice competition between you and Sapphire in Steel
(http://www.sapphiresteel.com) for marketshare.

Competition is good...

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/\.

3

Complete source code of our system can be downloaded from:
http://plas.fit.qut.edu.au/Ruby.NET

The download page gives an ASP error message.

Please note, that we have so far made no attempt to optimize the performance
of our system or to provide any support for interoperability with .NET
programs written in other languages. We have chosen instead to initially
focus on the challenging task of achieving complete semantic compatibility
with the standard Ruby interpreter. Once this is achieved we will move on to
those other challenges.

Even though you have said that, I am salivating a little. Okay, really,
a lot. If I understand your project page description of your approach
correctly, in theory, your approach would out-perform YARV by quite a
bit in most test cases because it's compiled. Can you tell us how much
overhead is added by having to send all method calls through your custom
call dispatcher? If it's not much then the benchmarks should come out a
little slower than C# execution speeds ... which would just be amazing.
*drool*

Obviously, the load-compile-run is going to be slower than in Ruby 1.8,
but, assuming some pre-compiling could be done similar to what Python
does with caching .pyc files, that could be overcome.

I know you haven't focused on performance yet but if you could just
comment on what you believe the performance "ceiling" is ...

To achieve full semantic compatibility, many sections of our runtime library
implementation mirrors the structure of the Ruby 1.8.2 interpreter code. We
thank Matz and his colleagues for making their source code available under
such a liberal license that enables works such as ours. We similarly, make
our system freely available under a similarly liberal open-source license.

We are seeking keen Ruby and .NET programmers to assist with further testing
and development (see our web site for further details).

I noticed, also, that you are funded by Microsoft and, as such, I'm sure
you're not very keen on Mono, but, I am curious, have you tried
compiling this on Mono's GMCS (their DotNet 2.0 compiler)? If so, what
work is needed to make it work there?

We look forward to your feedback ...

Great news!

···

On Tue, 2006-06-20 at 14:08 +0900, Wayne Kelly wrote:

4

Very exciting! I hope to see this progress quickly - I'm especially
interested in using it to drive Windows Forms applications.

I know you aren't requesting bug reports but I have a couple anyways:

ruby --version

ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [i386-mswin32]

rubycompiler --version

ruby 0.5.0 (2006-06-30) [Ruby.Net]

rubycompiler -e "puts 'Hello, world!'"

# No output

test.rb:

require 'net/http'
puts 'Hello, world!'

rubycompiler test.rb

Error: Ruby.RubyException: No such file to load -- net/http
   at Ruby.Methods.rb_f_load.Call1(Object recv, Frame caller, Proc block,
Object fname)
   at Ruby.Methods.rb_f_require.Call1(Object recv, Frame caller, Proc block,
Object fname)
   at Ruby.Eval.CallPrivate1(Object recv, Frame caller, String methodId,
Proc block, Object arg1)
   at hello.Init(Object recv, Frame caller)
   at hello.Main(String args)

Set RUBYLIB:

set RUBYLIB=c:\program files\ruby\lib\ruby\1.8;c:\program

files\ruby\lib\ruby\1.8\i386-mswin32

rubycompiler test.rb

# Different error - socket not found
Error: Ruby.RubyException: No such file to load -- socket
   at Ruby.Compiler.AST.PROGRAM.ExecuteInit(Assembly Assembly, Frame caller)
   at Ruby.Compiler.AST.PROGRAM.ExecuteInit(PEFile Assembly, Frame caller)
   at Ruby.Methods.rb_f_load.Call1(Object recv, Frame caller, Proc block,
Object fname)
   at Ruby.Methods.rb_f_require.Call1(Object recv, Frame caller, Proc block,
Object fname)
   at Ruby.Eval.CallPrivate1(Object recv, Frame caller, String methodId,
Proc block, Object arg1)
   at hello.Init(Object recv, Frame caller)
   at hello.Main(String args)

5

Nice work. I wish you all the best.

Michael

6

ruby --version

ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [i386-mswin32]

rubycompiler --version

ruby 0.5.0 (2006-06-30) [Ruby.Net]

i don't see a problem with that...maybe ruby 0.5.0 could be changed to
rubycompiler 0.5.0

rubycompiler -e "puts 'Hello, world!'"

# No output

[r:\ruby.net\bin]rubycompiler -e 'puts "hello, world"'
hello, world

http://home.cogeco.ca/~tsummerfelt1
telnet://ventedspleen.dyndns.org

···

On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 01:04:22 +0900, you wrote:

7

Actually, Sapphire in Steel is a Visual Studio plug-in for Ruby,

it is not a Ruby compiler for .NET. So they are not competitors in

that regard.

However, in a separate Microsoft sponsored project we are working

on a simple managed framework for integrating third party languages

such as Ruby into Visual Studio (based on lex and yacc like
specifications).

Cheers, Wayne.

Dr Wayne
Kelly

    Senior Lecturer

Email:
w.kelly@qut.edu.au
School of Software
Engineering and DC

Phone: +61 7 3864
9336
Faculty of
Information Technology

Fax: +61 7 3864
9390
Queensland
University of Technology

···

At 06:04 PM 20/06/2006, you wrote:

Wayne Kelly wrote:

We are pleased to announce the preliminary Beta release of the
Gardens

Point

Ruby.NET compiler. Note: this is not just a Ruby/.NET bridge, nor a
Ruby

Interpreter implemented on .NET, but a true .NET compiler.

Complete source code of our system can be downloaded from:


http://plas.fit.qut.edu.au/Ruby.NET

This is going to be a nice competition between you and Sapphire in Steel

(
http://www.sapphiresteel.com) for marketshare.

8

Complete source code of our system can be downloaded from:


http://plas.fit.qut.edu.au/Ruby.NET

The download page gives an ASP error message.

And what error is that? (I don’t get any errors)

Please note,
that we have so far made no attempt to optimize the performance

of our system or to provide any support for interoperability with
.NET

programs written in other languages. We have chosen instead to
initially

focus on the challenging task of achieving complete semantic
compatibility

with the standard Ruby interpreter. Once this is achieved we will
move on to

those other challenges.

Even though you have said that, I am salivating a little. Okay,
really,

a lot. If I understand your project page description of your
approach

correctly, in theory, your approach would out-perform YARV by quite
a

bit in most test cases because it’s compiled. Can you tell us how
much

overhead is added by having to send all method calls through your
custom

call dispatcher?

It does basically what the Ruby interpreter does …

It needs to work out the Ruby class of the receiver object and
search

for the method (by ID) in the method table of that class. If it
can’t

find it there it needs to search in sub-classes (and mix-ins).

The Ruby interpreter optimises this slightly by caching the methods

that have been called previously, but it still needs to do at least
this

one cache lookup. We haven’t yet implemented such a caching
mechanism

but we will do so.

On locating the method it needs to check if it can be legally
accessed

(public, private or protected).

If it’s not much
then the benchmarks should come out a

little slower than C# execution speeds … which would just be
amazing.

I wouldn’t be so confident.

Obviously, the
load-compile-run is going to be slower than in Ruby
1.8,

Not necessarily, once the load-compile step is out of the way,

we are executing native JIT compiled code rather than the
interpreting

that Ruby 1.8 is doing.

I know you haven’t
focused on performance yet but if you could just

comment on what you believe the performance “ceiling” is
…

I suspect some programs will run faster compiled to Managed .NET
code

and some will run faster interpreted with the native C
interpreter.

I noticed, also,
that you are funded by Microsoft and, as such, I’m sure

you’re not very keen on Mono, but, I am curious, have you tried

compiling this on Mono’s GMCS (their DotNet 2.0
compiler)?

We don’t have any issues with Mono. I haven’t had the chance to try

our compiler on Mono but I’d be really interested to know if it
works.

And if not, if there’s anything we need to change. We’re more than

happy to cooperate with any such efforts.

Cheers, Wayne.

Dr Wayne
Kelly

    Senior Lecturer

Email:
w.kelly@qut.edu.au

    School of

Software Engineering and DC

Phone: +61 7 3864
9336
Faculty of
Information Technology

Fax: +61 7 3864
9390
Queensland
University of Technology

···

On Tue, 2006-06-20 at 14:08 > +0900, Wayne Kelly wrote:
At 01:08 AM 21/06/2006, you wrote:

9

Very exciting! I hope to see
this progress quickly - I’m especially

interested in using it to drive Windows Forms applications.

I know you aren’t requesting bug reports but I have a couple
anyways:

require ‘net/http’

puts ‘Hello, world!’

rubycompiler
test.rb
Error: Ruby.RubyException: No such file to load –
net/http

Set RUBYLIB:

As expected.

set RUBYLIB=c:\program
files\ruby\lib\ruby\1.8;c:\program
files\ruby\lib\ruby\1.8\i386-mswin32
rubycompiler
test.rb

“net/http” requires “net/protocol” which requires
“socket.so”

We do not support loading of native libraries.

We support only the classes and modules built into the Ruby
language.

We do not plan to implement other classes such as socket which are

shipped with Ruby (apart from those implemented as standard Ruby source
code). Others in the community may volunteer to implement

those classes. Alternatively, you could use equivalent functionality

in the .NET class library.

Cheers, Wayne.

Dr Wayne
Kelly

    Senior Lecturer

Email:
w.kelly@qut.edu.au

    School of

Software Engineering and DC

Phone: +61 7 3864
9336
Faculty of
Information Technology

Fax: +61 7 3864
9390
Queensland
University of Technology

···

At 02:04 AM 21/06/2006, you wrote:

10

Sorry, that's not part of the bug report - I was just showing the version of
the code I was running.

···

On 6/20/06, tony summerfelt <snowzone5@hotmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 01:04:22 +0900, you wrote:

>>ruby --version
>ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [i386-mswin32]

>>rubycompiler --version
>ruby 0.5.0 (2006-06-30) [Ruby.Net]

i don't see a problem with that...maybe ruby 0.5.0 could be changed to
rubycompiler 0.5.0

11

It seems to be a sort of quoting args problem on windows CLI.
Single quoting works as above. (e.g. -e 'puts "hello, world"').
Double quoting doesn't work. (e.g. -e "puts 'hello, world'')
I have no idea, except Windows' CLI really sucks.

···

On 6/21/06, tony summerfelt <snowzone5@hotmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 01:04:22 +0900, you wrote:

>>rubycompiler --version
>ruby 0.5.0 (2006-06-30) [Ruby.Net]

i don't see a problem with that...maybe ruby 0.5.0 could be changed to
rubycompiler 0.5.0

>> rubycompiler -e "puts 'Hello, world!'"
># No output

[r:\ruby.net\bin]rubycompiler -e 'puts "hello, world"'
hello, world

--
http://nohmad.sub-port.net

12

Actually quoted strings on the command line is an interesting issue
…

Single quoted arguments is a UNIX concept and not generally supported on
Windows:

[r:\ruby.net\bin]rubycompiler -e ‘puts “hello, world”’

On Windows would produce argc = 4 and

argv[0] = “rubycompiler”

argv[1] = “-e”

argv[2] = “'puts”

argv[3] = “hello, world’”

To get around this, the Ruby interpreter on Windows instead calls
the

windows library function GetCommandLineA() to retrieve the raw command
line

and then parses it manually to reproduce UNIX semantics.

We similarly call System.Environment.CommandLine and perform our own

command line parsing, but that parsing code is so far, far from

complete - as you have illustrated.

Interestingly, even the Ruby 1.8 interpreter on Windows doesn’t
produce

the same results as on UNIX when the following command is issued
from

a command prompt window as everything following the ‘&’
character

is not even accessible to the GetCommandLineA function.

Ruby -i.bak -pe ‘sub(/[1]+$/){$&.to_i * 5}’ script_tmp

Cheers, Wayne.

Dr Wayne
Kelly

    Senior Lecturer

Email:
w.kelly@qut.edu.au
School of Software
Engineering and DC

Phone: +61 7 3864
9336
Faculty of
Information Technology

Fax: +61 7 3864
9390
Queensland
University of Technology

···

At 02:37 AM 21/06/2006, you wrote:

On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 01:04:22 > +0900, you wrote:

rubycompiler -e “puts ‘Hello, world!’”

No output

[r:\ruby.net\bin]rubycompiler -e ‘puts “hello, world”’

hello, world

  1. 0-9 ↩︎

13

Unfortunately this would limit the usefulness to me.
Is it a limitation of running native code?
Since .NET can support calling into native code, it seems on the surface
that you just need to detect the native modules and hook into them.
Sounds easy but may be involved.

Are you using C# or Managed C++?

Just wondering out loud.
-- Tom.

···

On 6/20/06, Wayne Kelly <w.kelly@qut.edu.au> wrote:

We do not support loading of native libraries.

--
"Nothing will ever be attempted, if all
possible objections must first be
overcome." - Samuel Johnson

"Luck is what happens when
preparation meets opportunity." - Seneca

14

Wayne Kelly wrote:

This is going to be a nice competition between you and Sapphire in Steel
http://www.sapphiresteel.com</a>) for marketshare.</blockquote><br>
Actually, Sapphire in Steel is a Visual Studio plug-in for Ruby,<br>
it is not a Ruby compiler for .NET. So they are not competitors in <br>
that regard.

That is correct. Though I should clarify that our current development is
the Steel IDE for Ruby or "Ruby In Steel". Our site is called "Sapphire
In Steel" and we shall, at a later date, provide more details of the
Sapphire project.

The Steel IDE should support development of a Ruby CLR compiler
developed by a third party and we shall be happy to cooperate to ensure
that this is the case.

best wishes
Huw Collingbourne
www.sapphireinsteel.com

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/\.

15

It does basically what the Ruby interpreter does ...
It needs to work out the Ruby class of the receiver object and search
for the method (by ID) in the method table of that class. If it can't
find it there it needs to search in sub-classes (and mix-ins).

That's *superclasses*, not subclasses, right?

···

On 6/21/06, Wayne Kelly <w.kelly@qut.edu.au> wrote:

Cheers, Wayne.

Dr Wayne Kelly Senior Lecturer
Email: w.kelly@qut.edu.au School of Software Engineering
and DC
Phone: +61 7 3864 9336 Faculty of Information Technology
Fax: +61 7 3864 9390 Queensland University of Technology

--
- Simen

16

Gyoung-Yoon Noh wrote:

It seems to be a sort of quoting args problem on windows CLI.
Single quoting works as above. (e.g. -e 'puts "hello, world"').
Double quoting doesn't work. (e.g. -e "puts 'hello, world'')
I have no idea, except Windows' CLI really sucks.

Depends. With regular ruby, no quoting issue:

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

d:\development>ruby -e "puts 'Hello!'"
Hello!

d:\development>ruby -e 'puts "Hello!"'
Hello!

···

--
James Britt

http://www.ruby-doc.org - Ruby Help & Documentation
Ruby Code & Style - The Journal By & For Rubyists
http://www.rubystuff.com - The Ruby Store for Ruby Stuff
http://yourelevatorpitch.com - Finding Business Focus

17

4nt makes it a wee bit better.

for most cli stuff i use cygwin (even for windows related operations).

http://home.cogeco.ca/~tsummerfelt1
telnet://ventedspleen.dyndns.org

···

On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 03:34:46 +0900, you wrote:

I have no idea, except Windows' CLI really sucks.

18

We do not support loading
of native libraries.

Unfortunately this would limit the usefulness to me.

Is it a limitation of running native code?

Since .NET can support calling into native code, it seems on the
surface

that you just need to detect the native modules and hook into them.

Sounds easy but may be involved.

It’s not so much that it’s native code, it’s more to do with the

API’s and data structures which Ruby native code libraries assume.

They assume interaction with internal data structures and APIs

defined in the Ruby interpreter. Whilst our implementation mirrors

some of these internal data structures - they are not easily
substitutable.

Are you using C# or
Managed C++?

C#, but I don’t think that is relevant to your concern.

Cheers, Wayne.

Dr Wayne
Kelly

    Senior Lecturer

Email:
w.kelly@qut.edu.au

    School of

Software Engineering and DC

Phone: +61 7 3864
9336
Faculty of
Information Technology

Fax: +61 7 3864
9390
Queensland
University of Technology

···

On 6/20/06, Wayne Kelly > w.kelly@qut.edu.au wrote:
At 05:21 PM 21/06/2006, you wrote:

19

Yes, sorry.

Cheers, Wayne.

Dr Wayne
Kelly

    Senior Lecturer

Email:
w.kelly@qut.edu.au

    School of

Software Engineering and DC

Phone: +61 7 3864
9336
Faculty of
Information Technology

Fax: +61 7 3864
9390
Queensland
University of Technology

···

On 6/21/06, Wayne Kelly > w.kelly@qut.edu.au wrote:

It does basically what the
Ruby interpreter does …

It needs to work out the Ruby class of the receiver object and
search

for the method (by ID) in the method table of that class. If it
can’t

find it there it needs to search in sub-classes (and
mix-ins).

That’s superclasses, not subclasses, right?

At 08:18 PM 21/06/2006, you wrote: