EaRing: A Meta-Literal Machine (high-level dynamic assembler) by Zed Shaw

scribd.com

17 points·rincewind··7 comments

Obligatory non-Scribd link:

http://www.zedshaw.com/repository/rubyenrails2008/build/ruby...

Is it just me, or is his pseudo-assembly language just a funny way to poke fun at MagLev (and all the rejoicing surrounding its announcement)?

So, in essence, Zed has come up with a dynamic front-end for the GNU Lightning assembler?

Is this using Lightning? We've done SPARC and x86 in pure Ruby without libraries here (for other reasons). You might be surprised how easy this stuff is to do. I assumed he just emits instructions.

I don't know why he wastes time with an actual parseable assembly language. Ruby and Python are vastly better languages than Assembler. They have all the same textual features that Assembler has, plus a real programming language to do things like virtualized registers.

I looked at Lightning recently, but it looked sort of as if it was dead. Is it still being maintained?

The gulf between what seems like a jit assembler grafted to Ruby/DL and a jit compiler for a language like Ruby seems vast. Cool project. Predicting it isn't going to change the world, any more than Zed's "makefile for printed books".

The grandiloquence of the slides was written with the tongue in the cheek. The project page is much more modest. http://www.zedshaw.com/projects/earing/

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