Lack of reaction to latest ruby implementations

ruby-talk
1

working on alternatives for the ruby runtime has
to be about the most difficult tasks one could take
on, and on top of that, the community interest doesn't
really help.

maybe its just me but i expected *many* more emails in
reply to the yarv and ruby2c releases!!!!!

come on guys and gals, surely these projects are worth
way more than that? what with being a possible future
to ruby, it seems natural that people would express
much more interest!

even if you don't want to or don't think you could help
out directly then at least get involved!, give feedback!
i'm sure the developers would love it!

Alex

2

Alexander Kellett wrote:

working on alternatives for the ruby runtime has
to be about the most difficult tasks one could take
on, and on top of that, the community interest doesn't
really help.

maybe its just me but i expected *many* more emails in
reply to the yarv and ruby2c releases!!!!!

come on guys and gals, surely these projects are worth
way more than that? what with being a possible future
to ruby, it seems natural that people would express
much more interest!

even if you don't want to or don't think you could help
out directly then at least get involved!, give feedback!
i'm sure the developers would love it!

Alex

Well, Alex, I kinda feel like a caveman who's just been given a wrench.
You're screaming "Look! Look! Look at this awesome tool we've
invented! And it's all yours!". I'm staring at the shiny new metal
thing, and deep down I get the feeling it's pretty important, but I
just don't know what to do with it.

Know what I mean?

Regards,

Dan

3

I don't think the (perceived) lack of response indicates a lack of
interest. To be fair, Ruby2C was only announced two days ago and I
suspect that most people (including myself) just haven't had the time
to download and try it out.

···

On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 07:04:11 +0900, Alexander Kellett <ruby-lists@lypanov.net> wrote:

working on alternatives for the ruby runtime has
to be about the most difficult tasks one could take
on, and on top of that, the community interest doesn't
really help.

maybe its just me but i expected *many* more emails in
reply to the yarv and ruby2c releases!!!!!

come on guys and gals, surely these projects are worth
way more than that? what with being a possible future
to ruby, it seems natural that people would express
much more interest!

even if you don't want to or don't think you could help
out directly then at least get involved!, give feedback!
i'm sure the developers would love it!

4

I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Where is the YARV announcement/release on this list? I certainly
haven't seen it. I saw a yarv/db thread but that was it. YARV looks
and sounds very interesting though. I just don't have a project to
run on it yet... when I do I'll make noise. :slight_smile:

ruby2c seems a very specialised thing. I mean sure, it's nearly 1.0.0
but nobody seems really sure what to do with it given the limitations
which are apparently by design.

Anyway, as a newcomer, I'm sure I don't know what to make of all this.
What about the official Ruby release and VM? Seems to be a lot of
forking going on.

Cheers,
Navin.

···

Alexander Kellett <ruby-lists@lypanov.net> wrote:

maybe its just me but i expected *many* more emails in
reply to the yarv and ruby2c releases!!!!!

5

Maybe it sounded to good to be true, and occupied the same mindspace
as Parrot and other dynamic VMs. That's sortof how my brain processed
it. It sortof hurts to think about VMs- it's like the beautiful girl
that is unattainable, so better not to get your hopes up :).

That said, my reaction was "wow, cool".

Nick

···

On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 07:04:11 +0900, Alexander Kellett <ruby-lists@lypanov.net> wrote:

working on alternatives for the ruby runtime has
to be about the most difficult tasks one could take
on, and on top of that, the community interest doesn't
really help.

maybe its just me but i expected *many* more emails in
reply to the yarv and ruby2c releases!!!!!

come on guys and gals, surely these projects are worth
way more than that? what with being a possible future
to ruby, it seems natural that people would express
much more interest!

even if you don't want to or don't think you could help
out directly then at least get involved!, give feedback!
i'm sure the developers would love it!

Alex

6

Id be way more interested in YARV if it wasnt so convoluted
to do. I have to download yarv (a given!), get a patch to
the ruby CVS... then get ruby from cvs. patch ruby. try and build.

i would rather have a tarball i could just download where its all
done.. then I have to try and not clobber any of my existing ruby
install (an easy given).

i usually break things when I try applying patches.

but then what? where from there? what next? how do I give feedback? how
do I help? I think YARV is a very important next step for ruby, but
what needs to be done to leap the chasm of just compiling it to being
helpful and providing back?

-stu

7

I am fairly interested in ruby2c, but I haven't had time to look
into it. It doesn't help if you hide references to it under a
subject of 'lack of reaction to ruby implementations'. I'm on
enough busy mailing lists that I receive an average of 1000 emails
per day. If your subject is meaningless to me, then I never read
the discussion.

That said, I did see some other reference to ruby2c. I think that
might make ruby more attractive to use in the "base system" of some
operating system. But I'm wondering if it really turns the script
into plain C -- with no dependencies on a ruby interpretter. Or if
it is like some other "scripting-language to executable" things
which I have seen, which merely combine the entire interpretter,
support libraries, and the source-script into one extremely large
and ungainly mess which happens to be a single executable program.

···

On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 07:04:11 +0900, Alexander Kellett <ruby-lists@lypanov.net> wrote:

working on alternatives for the ruby runtime has
to be about the most difficult tasks one could take
on, and on top of that, the community interest doesn't
really help.

maybe its just me but i expected *many* more emails in
reply to the yarv and ruby2c releases!!!!!

--
Garance Alistair Drosehn = drosihn@gmail.com
Senior Systems Programmer or gad@FreeBSD.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Troy, NY; USA

8

Well, people with existing ruby code usually can't afford to drop to a
subset of the language, so that rules out ruby2c a lot of the time.

I hadn't heard of YARV before, and would love to try it, but having to run
a patched version of a development version of ruby rules that out, too.
The version of ruby linked to from the YARV page won't even build and
install correctly here: the ruby binary keeps ending up with the version
number of the ruby I already had installed, then the install rule
complains about the version-number mismatch.

So, I think it's too soon to look for feedback on these projects from
people interested in development with ruby, instead of development of ruby.

···

On Fri, 04 Feb 2005 07:04:11 +0900, Alexander Kellett wrote:

working on alternatives for the ruby runtime has
to be about the most difficult tasks one could take
on, and on top of that, the community interest doesn't
really help.

maybe its just me but i expected *many* more emails in
reply to the yarv and ruby2c releases!!!!!

--
Neil Stevens - neil@hakubi.us

'A republic, if you can keep it.' -- Benjamin Franklin

9

I think you're misunderstanding the idea of YARV and ruby2c. They
aren't forks of Ruby. YARV is a VM for Ruby which is likely to become
part of Ruby 2.0. YARV works with your existing Ruby code (except for
unimplemented features, like continuations), and ruby2c is simply a
program that converts Ruby code into C. There's no forking going on,
and Matz's Ruby is still the one and only Ruby implementation.

Bill

···

On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 08:28:42 +0900, Navindra Umanee <navindra@cs.mcgill.ca> wrote:

Alexander Kellett <ruby-lists@lypanov.net> wrote:
> maybe its just me but i expected *many* more emails in
> reply to the yarv and ruby2c releases!!!!!

I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Where is the YARV announcement/release on this list? I certainly
haven't seen it. I saw a yarv/db thread but that was it. YARV looks
and sounds very interesting though. I just don't have a project to
run on it yet... when I do I'll make noise. :slight_smile:

ruby2c seems a very specialised thing. I mean sure, it's nearly 1.0.0
but nobody seems really sure what to do with it given the limitations
which are apparently by design.

Anyway, as a newcomer, I'm sure I don't know what to make of all this.
What about the official Ruby release and VM? Seems to be a lot of
forking going on.

Cheers,
Navin.

--
$stdout.sync = true
"Just another Ruby hacker.".each_byte do |b|
  ('a'..'z').step do|c|print c+"\b";sleep 0.007 end;print b.chr
end; print "\n"

10

I prefer to think of it as active experimentation.

Jeff.

···

On 04/02/2005, at 10:28 AM, Navindra Umanee wrote:

Anyway, as a newcomer, I'm sure I don't know what to make of all this.
What about the official Ruby release and VM? Seems to be a lot of
forking going on.

11

Sums up my thoughts perfectly. :frowning:

Joe

···

On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 08:10:38 +0900, Daniel Berger <djberg96@hotmail.com> wrote:

Alexander Kellett wrote:
> working on alternatives for the ruby runtime has
> to be about the most difficult tasks one could take
> on, and on top of that, the community interest doesn't
> really help.
>
> maybe its just me but i expected *many* more emails in
> reply to the yarv and ruby2c releases!!!!!
>
> come on guys and gals, surely these projects are worth
> way more than that? what with being a possible future
> to ruby, it seems natural that people would express
> much more interest!
>
> even if you don't want to or don't think you could help
> out directly then at least get involved!, give feedback!
> i'm sure the developers would love it!
>
> Alex

Well, Alex, I kinda feel like a caveman who's just been given a wrench.
You're screaming "Look! Look! Look at this awesome tool we've
invented! And it's all yours!". I'm staring at the shiny new metal
thing, and deep down I get the feeling it's pretty important, but I
just don't know what to do with it.

Know what I mean?

Regards,

Dan

12

I think it's a case of bated excitement. We dare not speak, for fear of
disturbing progress.

It's mostly for me, a combination of having work to get done at the
moment and no time to help -- I can only watch from afar, and hope for
the best.

···

On Fri, 2005-02-04 at 08:28 +0900, Navindra Umanee wrote:

Alexander Kellett <ruby-lists@lypanov.net> wrote:
> maybe its just me but i expected *many* more emails in
> reply to the yarv and ruby2c releases!!!!!

13

Where is the YARV announcement/release on this list? I certainly
haven't seen it. I saw a yarv/db thread but that was it. YARV looks
and sounds very interesting though. I just don't have a project to
run on it yet... when I do I'll make noise. :slight_smile:

the yarv announcement was a while ago, but i was just
surprised by the lack of interest in the two projects.
i hear so frequently "ruby is too slow" when in most
cases its just plain Fast Enough and in the few cases
when its not, projects like yarv and ruby2c attempt
to help and yet receive little feedback :frowning:

maybe there is much feedback on the yarv-jp mailing list?

ruby2c seems a very specialised thing. I mean sure, it's nearly 1.0.0
but nobody seems really sure what to do with it given the limitations
which are apparently by design.

see my reply to dan.

Anyway, as a newcomer, I'm sure I don't know what to make of all this.
What about the official Ruby release and VM? Seems to be a lot of
forking going on.

there is no official ruby vm... yet.
and these aren't forks, they are built
on top of the current ruby interpreter.

Alex

···

On Feb 4, 2005, at 12:28 AM, Navindra Umanee wrote:

14

hehe. oh. ah!. funny comparison :slight_smile:

well usage wise, i agree its not like you
can jump on board and replace your ruby
interpreter with either yarv or ruby2c/metaruby.
however, i would have expected that more people
were interested in a) helping out, b) giving
feedback, c) at least cheering the guys on :slight_smile:

as far as i understand, with ruby2c it would
be possible to write ruby extensions in a subset
so rather than having to write extensions in c
in order to fix a specific speed problem that
a better algorithm just doesn't exist for,
ruby2c could be used, no static typing, just
easy to write ruby! okay sure, there are many
limitations but i'd rather use a limited ruby
than have to worry about static typing
definitions in c!

and then on to metaruby, which is just plain
cool :slight_smile: imagine a ruby implementation written
in the language itself! rather than needing to
understand *yet another language* just to make
a minor change (for example to see how an rcr
would look in real life) wouldn't you love to be
able to extend and toy around with the interpreter
you're oh so fond of?

and YARV, well, just look at the benchmarks!
sure there are a few minor missing features, but
on the whole, other than bugs (which ko1 would
more than glad to know about i guess :wink: its
certainly not something to ignore :slight_smile:

anyways. at least i know now that its not because
of lack of interest. seems like a set of
misunderstandings :slight_smile:

so just to check, people are actually interested
in a faster ruby right? interested in a ruby 2.0
which would not only be faster in the general case!,
but due to the those speed improvements, would also
have some of the features that in the past were
cast off due to possible speed problems?. a ruby
implementation in which RCR's can be implemented
at a whim and extra extensions added in an easy
to use ruby subset?

thanks for the replies everyone :slight_smile:
Alex

···

On Feb 4, 2005, at 12:10 AM, Daniel Berger wrote:

Well, Alex, I kinda feel like a caveman who's just been given a wrench.
You're screaming "Look! Look! Look at this awesome tool we've
invented! And it's all yours!". I'm staring at the shiny new metal
thing, and deep down I get the feeling it's pretty important, but I
just don't know what to do with it.

Know what I mean?

15

i've seen very little from parrot directly with regards
to ruby, there is no maintained ruby/mono implementation,
and cardinal ain't seen a commit in quite a while. not sure
if somethings happening off in the background, but i've not
seen anything public.

yarv and ruby2c are both projects based around a community
need, and have no large external dependancies. what with yarv
being a possible implementation of the future ruby 2.0, aka
rite, i was very surprised that its not talked of much more.

any japanese speakers know if such things are spoken of
on the jp mailing lists?

/me ponders writing a book
  - 'the loneliness of a ruby re-implementor'

Alex

···

On Feb 4, 2005, at 5:27 AM, Nicholas Van Weerdenburg wrote:

Maybe it sounded to good to be true, and occupied the same mindspace
as Parrot and other dynamic VMs. That's sortof how my brain processed
it. It sortof hurts to think about VMs- it's like the beautiful girl
that is unattainable, so better not to get your hopes up :).

That said, my reaction was "wow, cool".

Nick

16

yakumo9275@gmail.com ha scritto:

Id be way more interested in YARV if it wasnt so convoluted
to do. I have to download yarv (a given!), get a patch to
the ruby CVS... then get ruby from cvs. patch ruby. try and build.

i would rather have a tarball i could just download where its all
done.. then I have to try and not clobber any of my existing ruby
install (an easy given).

i usually break things when I try applying patches.

write yourself a simple script to automate the task, and just have a little care to configure the ruby build with something like --program-suffix=19forYARVexperimentation

but then what? where from there? what next? how do I give feedback? how
do I help? I think YARV is a very important next step for ruby, but
what needs to be done to leap the chasm of just compiling it to being
helpful and providing back?

I agree on this, and I think it is also valid for ruby2c, rubydium and maybe ruby itself (but you have the ruby hacker's guide, there).

My 2c:
a great example of how to handle the newbie-developer-barrier is the Kernel Janitor project for linux (and IIRC there is something similar in freebsd-land).
Provide some tiny goals for newbie developers which are simple enough to be done for them and that basically annoy you :slight_smile:
I.e. fix some of the thousand warnings that ruby and yarv spit out when compiled with various warning flags.

This allows to get a feeling on the internals, produces a useful result, and lowers the gap beetween "user" and "developer".

17

It turns a method (or bunch of methods) into "plain" C, for some definition of plain. Currently it doesn't generate any C code that is dependent on the interpreter, but that may change (or branch to do both) in the future.

···

On Feb 4, 2005, at 3:00 PM, Garance A Drosehn wrote:

That said, I did see some other reference to ruby2c. I think that
might make ruby more attractive to use in the "base system" of some
operating system. But I'm wondering if it really turns the script
into plain C -- with no dependencies on a ruby interpretter. Or if
it is like some other "scripting-language to executable" things
which I have seen, which merely combine the entire interpretter,
support libraries, and the source-script into one extremely large
and ungainly mess which happens to be a single executable program.

--
ryand-ruby@zenspider.com - Seattle.rb - Seattle.rb | Home
http://blog.zenspider.com/ - http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby2c

18

Neil Stevens ha scritto:

I hadn't heard of YARV before, and would love to try it, but having to run
a patched version of a development version of ruby rules that out, too. The version of ruby linked to from the YARV page won't even build and
install correctly here: the ruby binary keeps ending up with the version
number of the ruby I already had installed, then the install rule
complains about the version-number mismatch.

I think you have some environment problem, it does build correctly for me on both my win32 and linux boxes.
Or maybe, since that is just a cvs snapshot, you were unlucky by getting a temporarily broken version :slight_smile:

19

NOT TRUE!

There is zero reason for most people to compile their entire apps. Bottlenecks are usually a 90/10 thing (or 99/01 really) and are often very structured and algorithmic. There is usually very little reason why those small snippets can't be rewritten to use a nice clean static subset of ruby that can be translated to C.

As a trivial-but-real example, I point you to the second from the last slide in http://www.zenspider.com/~ryand/Ruby2C.pdf

···

On Feb 5, 2005, at 4:05 AM, Neil Stevens wrote:

Well, people with existing ruby code usually can't afford to drop to a
subset of the language, so that rules out ruby2c a lot of the time.

--
ryand-ruby@zenspider.com - http://blog.zenspider.com/
http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby2c/
http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyinline/

20

Hi,

···

In message "Re: lack of reaction to latest ruby implementations" on Fri, 4 Feb 2005 08:47:24 +0900, Bill Atkins <batkins57@gmail.com> writes:

Matz's Ruby is still the one and only Ruby implementation.

You have JRuby as well.

              matz.