# Porting Ruby: 1.8 or 1.9? **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [November 12, 2007, 1:05am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/porting-ruby-1-8-or-1-9/119897 "2007-11-12T01:05:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/a88e57/32.png) [@jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jay-levitt)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2007, 1:05am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/porting-ruby-1-8-or-1-9/119897/1 "2007-11-12T01:05:23Z")
I’ve got a consulting gig at the moment, working on Stratus fault-tolerant servers, and I don’t have much excuse to play with Ruby. So I thought “Wouldn’t it be fun to try porting Ruby to Stratus?” (Stratus servers - I can’t really call them “minicomputers” anymore - run a proprietary operating system called VOS. It’s written by some of the same people who wrote Multics, and shares many of its features. Two decades ago, there wasn’t even a C compiler available. In recent years, they’ve made some large strides toward portability, switching to a Xeon-based platform, with POSIX.1 compliance built in, and gcc, perl5, SAMBA, and other mainstays available.) This would really be a just-for-fun project, for some strange values of “fun”. The VOS community is tiny and shrinking, and the types of businesses still running VOS are not likely to adopt Ruby - last I heard, the biggest codebases were in COBOL and PL/I in that order. Even Stratus’s own marketing materials talk about “staying on the VOS platform if you choose to do so” and migrating off it “as painlessly as possible”. It’s far from obsolete, but neither is it the future. So, in all likelihood, the port wouldn’t be used. I just wanna see if I can build it at all, and keep Ruby on my mind. Disabling wide swaths of functionality isn’t a big deal (e.g. threads). Can anbody recommend which tree - 1.8 or 1.9 - is easier to port to oddball systems? Anyone done that lately? I seem to remember hearing about Ruby running on a phone. ---
**Author:** ![jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/a88e57/32.png) [@jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jay-levitt)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2007, 1:45am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/porting-ruby-1-8-or-1-9/119897/2 "2007-11-12T01:45:43Z")
Jay L. wrote: > other mainstays available.) > can build it at all, and keep Ruby on my mind. Disabling wide swaths of > functionality isn’t a big deal (e.g. threads). > > Can anbody recommend which tree - 1.8 or 1.9 - is easier to port to oddball > systems? Anyone done that lately? I seem to remember hearing about Ruby > running on a phone. Well, if you’ve got GCC, either one should be “easily ported”. But 1.8 has threads and a scheduler built into the language, while 1.9 has to have native OS threads available. So if you _want_ threads, go with 1.8. Then again, if it’s all about fun, why not write a Ruby 1.9 interpreter from scratch in PL/I? ---
**Author:** ![jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/a88e57/32.png) [@jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jay-levitt)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2007, 2:40am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/porting-ruby-1-8-or-1-9/119897/3 "2007-11-12T02:40:37Z")
On Sun, 11 Nov 2007 19:45:02 -0500, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: > Well, if you’ve got GCC, either one should be “easily ported”. But 1.8 > has threads and a scheduler built into the language, while 1.9 has to > have native OS threads available. So if you _want_ threads, go with 1.8. Ah, interesting. Does 1.9 have to have native threads just to run? Or only if you want to use threads from the application? Actually, threads were probably a bad example, since (unless there are some oddities in VOS’s POSIX pthread implementation) I imagine they’ll work OK. I was more wondering if, say, 1.9 used a more modern autoconf, or anything like that. One of the hardest things about porting apps to VOS is apparently the autoconf scripts; they generally either (a) don’t have the notion of an “executable” suffix (a la .EXE), or (b) they do, but they don’t use it consistently - e.g. it works for native Windows but not for the whole POSIX build path. When I tried to see if 1.8.6 would “just build”, that was the first thing I ran into; VOS executables end in .pm, but Ruby’s autoconf script ignores that for all the various tests it runs once it finds gcc. (Worse, shell scripts like autoconf are the single slowest thing you can run in VOS; “fork” really creates a whole new login process, which takes about half a second, so just getting through a configure script can take an hour or more.) Also, if Ruby assumes that x86 = little-endian, I’ve got some work to do. > Then again, if it’s all about fun, why not write a Ruby 1.9 interpreter > from scratch in PL/I? My cardiologist tells me that I should try not to have too much fun at one time. ---
**Author:** ![jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/a88e57/32.png) [@jay-levitt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/jay-levitt)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2007, 4:25am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/porting-ruby-1-8-or-1-9/119897/4 "2007-11-13T04:25:56Z")
On Sun, 11 Nov 2007 19:03:08 -0500, Jay L. wrote: > Can anbody recommend which tree - 1.8 or 1.9 - is easier to port to oddball > systems? Anyone done that lately? I seem to remember hearing about Ruby > running on a phone. Answer my own question and give a tip to Googlers: For the moment, anyway, Ruby 1.9 requires Ruby to build itself. So that’d be a bad idea.