Hello everyone,

I thought I'd talk about my new project here, since there is a good 
chance that someone might be interested in it.  I'm planning to put 
Ruby on top of Smalltalk VMs.  Ruby and Smalltalk are very similar 
under the covers, so Smalltalk VMs are a very good match for the 
language.  This will give Ruby a much faster execution environment, VMs 
which are capable of incremental garbage collection, a wonderful 
debugger which will let them modify methods, a "workspace" window, a 
visual "inspect", and a readily accessible meta-level which will allow 
Rubyists to readily modify their own language.

My strategy for doing this involves writing a Ruby parser (or, rather, 
translating an existing one from Java to Ruby) then enabling a 
Smalltalk object to request parsing of Ruby code into an AST from a 
Ruby program outside the image.  We then reify the AST inside the image 
and use it to compile Ruby methods into bytecodes.  Once this is done, 
we can then compile the external Ruby parser and bring it into the 
image.

If anyone is interested, please drop me a line.  But in particular, I 
am wondering if anyone knows the whereabouts of Joe Bacanskas.  
(Gemstone is one of the VMs I'd like to target at first.)

--Peter

--
There's neither heaven nor hell, save what we grant ourselves.
There's neither fairness nor justice, save what we grant each other.