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Yes, but it's not turtles all the way down. Useful libraries written in other languages (C in this case) can benefit the platform (Ruby). The most common case
by andreaja 16y ago
Yes, but it's not turtles all the way down.
Useful libraries written in other languages (C in this case) can benefit the platform (Ruby). The most common case for this is for speed benefits, but there are other possible goals as well.
To paraphrase the JRuby team "We write Java so you don't have to".
- lamnk 16y agoWhat's the point of self hosted interpreters like PyPY or Rubinius then ? Shouldn't Ruby core team write MRI all in C to make Ruby faster ?
- gaius 16y agoBecause you can prototype more easily, then implement what you're happy with in C. It's funny, for some language communities (i.e. Java) being "self-hosted" is a big deal. I can't speak for Ruby but in the Python world, we simply don't consider it a major issue.
- steveklabnik 16y agoI can't speak for PyPy, but Rubinius isn't a project of ruby-core... and MRI is written in all C. And MRI isn't the latest version of Ruby, YARV is. (MRI -> 1.8, YARV -> 1.9) Finally, Rubinius is architected totally differently than YARV. Rubinius uses a JIT, YARV is just an interpreter.