# Development of Ruby VMs **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [December 2, 2009, 2:46pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/development-of-ruby-vms/179713 "2009-12-02T14:46:28Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![robkuz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/34f0e0/32.png) [@robkuz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/robkuz)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2009, 2:46pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/development-of-ruby-vms/179713/1 "2009-12-02T14:46:28Z")
Hi, I had heard of most of the mentioned projects once but is impressive to see them all in a single list: it’s longer than I would have guessed! [http://www.igvita.com/2009/11/20/state-of-ruby-vms-ruby-renaissance/](http://www.igvita.com/2009/11/20/state-of-ruby-vms-ruby-renaissance/) Cheers robert ---
**Author:** ![robkuz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/34f0e0/32.png) [@robkuz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/robkuz)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2009, 4:40pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/development-of-ruby-vms/179713/2 "2009-12-02T16:40:37Z")
Robert K. wrote: > I had heard of most of the mentioned projects once but is impressive > to see them all in a single list: it’s longer than I would have > guessed! > > [State of Ruby VMs: Ruby Renaissance - igvita.com](http://www.igvita.com/2009/11/20/state-of-ruby-vms-ruby-renaissance/) There’s a couple ones missing, actually. Overall, there have been around 30 Ruby implementations to date. Although only half of them are still being developed (for generous definitions of “half” and “developed”) and only three of them (MRI, JRuby, YARV) have ever produced a production release. (And one could argue about whether an implementation which doesn’t even _run_ its _own_ testsuite, let alone _pass_ it, or one which leaks memory, can be called “production ready”.) Among the ones that _are_ still being developed and that are missing from the list are: - YARV (Koichi Sasada’s custom VM for Ruby 1.9) - XRuby (Ruby compiler for the JVM) - SmallRuby (Ruby on Smalltalk/X) - tinyrb (Marc-André Cournoyer’s tiny Ruby-subset VM) - HotRuby (YARV bytecode interpreter on Flash or ECMAScript) - Cardinal (Ruby on Parrot) Especially YARV seems to be a pretty big omission from the list. A couple of the ones that are no longer being developed but are nonetheless interesting are: - the original IronRuby (yes, there are two implementations called IronRuby; this one had experimental support for continuations, which is something that JRuby, XRuby, [Ruby.NET](http://Ruby.NET) and the other IronRuby don’t have) - Carbone (Ruby VM automatically generated by vmgen) - IoRuby (Ruby on Io) - MetaRuby (Ruby 100% in Ruby, using Ruby2C) - Red Sun (YARV bytecode interpreter in ActionScript) And of course Rite, the mythical Ruby implementation that Matz once wanted to write one day, but never did. jwm ---
**Author:** ![robkuz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/34f0e0/32.png) [@robkuz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/robkuz)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2009, 4:47pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/development-of-ruby-vms/179713/3 "2009-12-02T16:47:39Z")
El Miércoles, 2 de Diciembre de 2009, Jörg W Mittag escribió: > Especially YARV seems to be a pretty big omission from the list. > What about Rubinius? ---
**Author:** ![robkuz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/34f0e0/32.png) [@robkuz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/robkuz)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2009, 6:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/development-of-ruby-vms/179713/4 "2009-12-02T18:35:56Z")
Iñaki Baz C. wrote: > > Especially YARV seems to be a pretty big omission from the list. > > What about Rubinius? That’s already on Ilya’s list. jwm ---
**Author:** ![robkuz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/34f0e0/32.png) [@robkuz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/robkuz)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2009, 7:49pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/development-of-ruby-vms/179713/5 "2009-12-02T19:49:06Z")
On 2 Dec 2009, at 15:40, Jörg W Mittag wrote: > Among the ones that _are_ still being developed and that are missing > from the list are: > > - tinyrb (Marc-André Cournoyer’s tiny Ruby-subset VM) Hopefully this list will soon be joined by RubyGoLightly, my project to port TinyRb from C to Go and then see where that leads. Anyone interested in helping (or chucking stones) can find work in progress at: [GitHub - feyeleanor/RubyGoLightly: An experimental port of TinyRb to Google go, both as a means of learning go and exploring alternate approaches to implementing Ruby. Work is currently focused on the GoLightly VM.](http://github.com/feyeleanor/RubyGoLightly) Ellie ## Eleanor McHugh Games With Brains [http://slides.games-with-brains.net](http://slides.games-with-brains.net) raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds\_to? :reason ---
**Author:** ![robkuz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/34f0e0/32.png) [@robkuz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/robkuz)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2009, 12:31pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/development-of-ruby-vms/179713/6 "2009-12-03T12:31:04Z")
Eleanor McHugh wrote: > [GitHub - feyeleanor/RubyGoLightly: An experimental port of TinyRb to Google go, both as a means of learning go and exploring alternate approaches to implementing Ruby. Work is currently focused on the GoLightly VM.](http://github.com/feyeleanor/RubyGoLightly) > This looks very cool! Now, if only tinyrb worked on Windows, Go worked on Windows and I could overcome my deep-seated hatred against so-called “systems programming languages”[1] and actually bring myself to learning the damn thing. Anyway, regarding your “see where that leads”, I have a couple of questions: - Are you planning to use Go’s garbage collector or provide your own? Currently, tinyrb uses the Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative garbage collector (AFAIK anyway), which incidentally is also the collector used by one of the two Go implementations. Marc-André was considering switching to reference counting, which incidentally is also what the _other_ Go implementation is planning on doing. - Are you simply using Go as an implementation language, like, say, tinyrb, MRI, YARV or Rubinius do or are you planning some sort of interoperability between Go and Ruby as JRuby and IronRuby do or even a very deep unification of the two languages like MacRuby and MagLev? - Are you planning on implementing Threads with Goroutines? What about Fibers, Continuations? - Are you planning on surfacing the CSP/Pi-calculus style concurrency of the Go runtime somehow in Ruby? - Are you planning anything at all, or just having fun? (-: jwm [1] This hatred is rooted in two things: ``` 1.) "Systems programming language" is commonly used as a euphemism for "crappy programming language" in the sense that "we know it's crap but it's okay, because it's a systems programming language!". Ex.: C, C++, Java 2.) I strongly believe that systems programming languages should not exist. Writing operating systems, garbage collectors, compilers, interpreters, real-time systems, interrupt handlers, databases, etc. *in* Lisp, Smalltalk, Python, Haskell has been done for decades, as has writing fast implementations *for* them. ``` ---
**Author:** ![robkuz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/34f0e0/32.png) [@robkuz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/robkuz)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2009, 4:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/development-of-ruby-vms/179713/7 "2009-12-02T16:53:30Z")
El Miércoles, 2 de Diciembre de 2009, Jörg W Mittag escribió: > - HotRuby (YARV bytecode interpreter on Flash or ECMAScript) From the project web ([http://hotruby.yukoba.jp](http://hotruby.yukoba.jp)): * * * ## Most of the grammars are implemented. However, exceptions are not implemented. Most of the build-in functions and build-in classes are not implemented. The idea is good, but obviously it’s not mantained, neither enoguh advanced. ---
**Author:** ![robkuz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/34f0e0/32.png) [@robkuz](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/robkuz)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2009, 7:30pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/development-of-ruby-vms/179713/8 "2009-12-04T19:30:40Z")
On 3 Dec 2009, at 11:30, Jörg W Mittag wrote: > > [GitHub - feyeleanor/RubyGoLightly: An experimental port of TinyRb to Google go, both as a means of learning go and exploring alternate approaches to implementing Ruby. Work is currently focused on the GoLightly VM.](http://github.com/feyeleanor/RubyGoLightly) > > This looks very cool! > > Now, if only tinyrb worked on Windows, Go worked on Windows and I > could overcome my deep-seated hatred against so-called “systems > programming languages”[1] and actually bring myself to learning the > damn thing. Well I’m not holding my breath on Go making it to Windows anytime soon, but I hope I’m wrong. I also share many of your feelings about “systems programming languages”, compounded by the fact I spend a lot of time working on C codebases. Part of what I find appealing about Go is that it reads like a high-level language, that and the fact that it provides a decent native concurrency model. > Anyway, regarding your “see where that leads”, I have a couple of > questions: > > - Are you planning to use Go’s garbage collector or provide your own? > Currently, tinyrb uses the Boehm-Demers-Weiser conservative > garbage collector (AFAIK anyway), which incidentally is also the > collector used by one of the two Go implementations. Marc-André > was considering switching to reference counting, which > incidentally is also what the _other_ Go implementation is > planning on doing. I’d like to phrase everything to leverage Go’s garbage collection, the same way that JRuby uses the JVM’s collector. > - Are you simply using Go as an implementation language, like, say, > tinyrb, MRI, YARV or Rubinius do or are you planning some sort of > interoperability between Go and Ruby as JRuby and IronRuby do or > even a very deep unification of the two languages like MacRuby and > MagLev? As Go’s still a bit of a moving target I’m initially looking at it as an implementation language, although supporting NaCl and other elements of Google’s emerging software platform would be interesting. > - Are you planning on implementing Threads with Goroutines? What about > Fibers, Continuations? It’ll use Goroutines for both Threads and Fibers, and I’m interested in using the Go Iterator pattern to implement Ruby Enumerators. Continuations should also be feasible, although a lot depends on how the VM’s instruction set evolves and the > - Are you planning on surfacing the CSP/Pi-calculus style concurrency > of the Go runtime somehow in Ruby? Whilst it’d be nice to have it’s a very low priority - at least until there’s a stable interpreter capable of passing all of TinyRb’s tests. > - Are you planning anything at all, or just having fun? (-: Well fun is a big part of it 🙂 However there’s also a plan. Initially I want to get a codebase that compiles, makes reasonable use of Go’s idioms, and passes TinyRb’s tests. Once that milestone is hit I plan to experiment with the VM’s instruction set and to start fleshing out the runtime, possibly with the intention of becoming a full-blown Ruby implementation (if there’s a demand). A high priority at that stage will be getting Ruby-FFI support so I can continue my low-level coding adventures 🙂 Ellie ## Eleanor McHugh Games With Brains [http://slides.games-with-brains.net](http://slides.games-with-brains.net) raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds\_to? :reason