Ruby => Rite, AST => Bytecode?

[Austin Ziegler]

Matz and fellow Rubyists,

On pragprog, we're sort-of discussing the creation of a new language
("Pragmatic") as an exercise in extending one's programming
experience. Now, there's a lot of discussion on the low-end, but the
most interesting to me was this, and I was wondering if something
like the idea behind Juice might be a good thing for Rite, rather
than a "pure" bytecode setup.

What do you think?

-austin

On Wed, 30 Jul 2003 11:57:26 +1000, Sumskas, Peter (Peter) wrote:
[...]

> The idea behind Juice was to encode a portable encoding of the
> program not as bytecode (which is the usual way to do things) but
> to encode the AST as the portable format. This lead to several
> interesting features for Juice:
>
> * the binaries were actually smaller than the equivalent bytecodes
> and smaller by far that machine-specific binaries.
> * the binaries contained far more information about program
> structure than the equivalent bytecodes did. This led to being
> able to take better advantage of the target platform. A JIT
> compiler would translate the AST into the backend representation
> and it had a much easier time of optimizing the code than an
> equivalent JIT compiler for a bytecode system would have. I saw
> this demonstrated in '97 or '98. Given that Juice had less
> resources than Java devoted to it you can imagine how impressive
> it was to see a recoding of some Java applets executing
> approximately five times as fast as the original Java did (I
> realize this is highly subjective but the implication is that
> wherever the limitation was with Java they had taken the wrong
> approach to portability and performance).
> * due to the small size of the binaries it was faster, on networks
> and PCs of the day, to download a Juice applet and JIT-compile
> them on the target machine than it was to download the
> equivalent platform-specific binary and execute it.

[...]

--
austin ziegler * [email]austin@halostatue.ca[/email] * Toronto, ON, Canada
software designer * pragmatic programmer * 2003.07.29
* 23.18.28

[Aredridel]

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On Tue, 2003-07-29 at 21:18, Austin Ziegler wrote:

> Matz and fellow Rubyists,
>=20
> On pragprog, we're sort-of discussing the creation of a new language
> ("Pragmatic") as an exercise in extending one's programming
> experience. Now, there's a lot of discussion on the low-end, but the
> most interesting to me was this, and I was wondering if something
> like the idea behind Juice might be a good thing for Rite, rather
> than a "pure" bytecode setup.

Oooh, interesting -- I like the idea, because it allows for far more
introspection into the AST while giving a compact binary format to
actually run.

It might make a really perfect middle ground for such a highly dynamic
language such as our favorite, Ruby...

Ari

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[Phil Tomson]

In article <2003729231834.987146@PADD>,
Austin Ziegler <austin@halostatue.ca> wrote:

>Matz and fellow Rubyists,
>
>On pragprog, we're sort-of discussing the creation of a new language
>("Pragmatic") as an exercise in extending one's programming
>experience. Now, there's a lot of discussion on the low-end, but the
>most interesting to me was this, and I was wondering if something
>like the idea behind Juice might be a good thing for Rite, rather
>than a "pure" bytecode setup.
>
>What do you think?

Sounds like an interesting discussion, how does one get on this mailing
list?

Phil

[Pat Eyler]

On Thu, 31 Jul 2003, Phil Tomson wrote:

> In article <2003729231834.987146@PADD>,
> Austin Ziegler <austin@halostatue.ca> wrote:

> >On pragprog, we're sort-of discussing the creation of a new language
> >("Pragmatic") as an exercise in extending one's programming
> >experience.

>
> Sounds like an interesting discussion, how does one get on this mailing
> list?
>

[email]pragprog-subscribe@yahoogroups.com[/email] will get you on the list that
generated the idea.

[email]pragmatic_lang-subscribe@yahoogroups.com[/email] will get you on the (new)
implementors list

-pate

> Phil
>