evan.musing << current

Some recent commits to rubinius have yield some great results:

• Continuations: They’re under fire right now in the ruby community as to whether they’re a feature that implementations need to support. Rather than wait for the dust to clear, I went through the motions of implementing them in rubinius. It was amazingly simple actually. It required some debugging to get it correct, but all in all there wasn’t actually all that much code, just a primitive VM method to manually activate a method context (aka a stack frame). Having method context’s be first class objects is what made it easy, and it’s again validated my decision to make everything possible first class.
• additional stability: more work to stabilize the core has yield some new error conditions that get nicely translated into exceptions being thrown, the primary one being when the stack is blown (all used up) a StackExploded exception is thrown and can be handled (carefully)
• clean up: I’ve gone through the whole process front a fresh checkout and fixed up the order of things that were missed when I was constantly using a copy that had some cached object files.

You should be able to build and test shotgun now pretty easily, doing as follows:

$ rake shotgun
$ rake test_shotgun

It will go through building shotgun and running the current set of core tests against it.

If you encounter errors, please email me with them, and attach a patch if you want!

Soon I’ll be release some code with rubinius that will let people automatically report errors, I’ll post once it’s up and running.

I’ve just checked in Prototype S, called shotgun, to svn. It’s not even close to complete, but it’s running compiled methods that were generated by the Prototype B compiler. It’s a big first step, and things will hopefully start to go quickly.

Nick Sieger is such a stud. He’s transcripted all the rubyconf talk this year. An amazing feat because he’s doing it what seems to be almost realtime and posting it directly on his blog. Even even did mine!

Check out all the rest of the talks this year, it’s been/going great!

Everyone keeps saying that I’m not a real programmer until I’ve got a blog. So now I do.

I’ll be posting about rubinius progress and other things in coming hours and days.