tags:

views:

103

answers:

2
+1  Q: 

What is the state of Ruby as a compiled language?

Ruby has been around for a while now so I was wondering if there was any work being done on a compiler for it? I know that compiler design is hindered by things like Eval() so I would not expect implementations to be 100 percent accurate? My own searches have turned up sparse results.

A: 

Rubinius is a JIT compiler for Ruby. A pure compiler will never exist for Ruby because the language is far too dynamic for a static compiler to work. Whatever it did internally would be incredibly ugly and would evolve towards a JIT as they tried to optimize it anyway.

dasil003  2010-04-02 20:59:47
I'm not real familiar with Ruby. Is it really so much more dynamic than Common Lisp, which is normally compiled?
David Thornley  2010-04-02 21:04:31
Here is a good walk though of some of the ideas about what is or is not a compiled language. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/376611/why-interpreted-langs-are-mostly-ducktyped-while-compiled-have-strong-typing/376828#376828
JustSmith  2010-04-02 21:11:49
+3  A: 

MacRuby offers Ahead-of-Time Compilation as of v0.5. It uses LLVM to compile binaries that will run on the Objective-C runtime.

csexton  2010-04-03 01:35:14
I'm running on windows but of the two non-preferred platform responses I like OSX more.
JustSmith  2010-04-15 04:33:34

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