evan.musing << current

The venerable Eric Hodel (drbrain) has whipped the rubinius team into blogging more, so this should be the first of many posts to come.

Development front

We continue to push forward, getting rubinius running everyday ruby code. I continue to use irb under rubinius daily, and it’s proved quite stable.

Though, we’ve begun to hit the standard lib code that is quite tricky. Case in point, mathn.rb. mathn.rb adds some new methods to Fixnum and Bignum, as well as redefining some very core methods, like, Fixnum#/ (divide). We’re currently working through how to support this, because as is, when mathn redefines that method to start returning Floats, most of the rubinius system goes south. Thats because the kernel currently assumes that if it uses Fixnum#/, a Fixnum is returned, and it can pass that to other primitives and such.
We’re still unsure about the long term solution for this, but it does bring up a problem with having a very open, dynamic language, where the kernel of the language uses that same open, dynamic runtime. A user can change the behavior of a core, system method, and effect a lot more than they could in MRI. This is the famous double edged sword.
My hope is that we’re able to code the kernel a little defensively and really stabilize the kernel to the point that these kinds of changes wont cause the whole system to go south.

Conference front

Seems that 2008 is going to be the year of conferences for me.

• On Feb 8th and 9th, Ezra and I will be at acts_as_conference, giving a charity tutorial talk about how to be a better ruby developer.
• Next, I’ve been invited to give at talk about rubinius, as well as the “Party” keynote (not sure what the party part is actually) at RubyFools over in Copenhagen, Denmark. This should be a lot of fun for a few reasons.
  1. I’ll be giving a non-Rubinius specific talk for once (the keynote), which is something I’ve wanted to do for a while.
  2. I’ve never been to Denmark, so it’s always fun to visit a new city.
  3. Abby is coming too! She’s going to sightsee and such while I’m at the conference, and we’ll have a few days before and after to take day trips and such. She loves europe, it should be a great time.
• There a bunch after this, but I’m not yet sure which I’m going to. The total is something like 5 or 6 before June 1st, so it’s going to be busy busy busy no matter what.

More to come!

There have been some amazing things happening in the rubinius world in the last week.

• compiler2 (aka. c2) became stable enough that we began using it for everyday usage. This is big in my mind because c2 is vastly superior to compiler1. Also, it shows the power of the approach we’re taking. To my knowledge, we’re the only project to write 2 completely separate compilers for our project. We were able to do this primarily because both compilers have been written entirely in ruby.
• Springboarding off c2 being stable, Kernel#eval() got implemented in really an incredibly small number of lines and in a short amount of time. I began working on it at midnight one night. Worked til 3am that night, then again the rest of the next day. So in about 12 hours, we had a eval that passes the craziest of eval specs. Most of the reason for that was again the approach. Having MethodContext’s be first class objects made getting all the proper info for eval simple. The architecture for c2 made it super easy to add in the custom logic to make eval operate properly. Again, all done 100% in ruby.
• Again, coming off eval working, irb became functional. Getting it running flushed out a few bugs (5 I think), and it runs perfectly. This is big for anyone that has looked at the irb codebase. It contains a lot of meta-magic as well as a large, complicated ruby tokenizer for parsing the code the user types in. This is giant news for me because it means that the project has finally built the codebase and momentum to run real world ruby code. I almost wet my pants when I fired up irb and it worked.
• Galvanized by the success of irb running, I started in on rake. Rake contains a great set of tests to use to make sure rubinius is actually working properly, so I started in on those. I first found that rake’s test use flexmock, another library that jim wrote. So I started on flexmock’s tests instead. That exposed a few bugs, but after about an hour, it was running at 100%. Flexmock uses a TON of meta-magic, so having it work validates a lot of work we’ve been doing. On to rake’s test, again, flushing out bugs. I managed to get everything working except for a few things that depend on our currently broken Dir.glob.
  But in the end, I was able to have rake process our Rakefile properly and spit out the list of tasks and run a few of them. So awesome.
• Lastly, we removed compiler1 completely and renamed compiler2 to compiler. The compiler is dead! Long live the compiler!

Man, it’s been a busy last 7 days. I’m so excited about these developments because as I said earlier, it means that the momentum on the project has built up the point that we’re making real progress running real world code. This is a seminal moment for the project. Up to now, we’ve been running uphill, slogging through specs and trying to get enough code in place. We’ve finally reached the top of the first hill and now we’re running downhill, headed for 1.0. There are a lot more hills in front of us, but clearing the first one means that there is no going back.

My hat is off to every single rubinius committer and person that has helped out on the project, most of all EngineYard. We’d never have reached this milestone in the project this early if it weren’t for all of you. Find me on the street and I’ll buy you a coffee, or in a bar and I’ll buy you a beer.

Enjoy!