Poetics: The first native implementation of CoffeeScript on the Rubinius VM | Hacker News Reader

Poetics: The first native implementation of CoffeeScript on the Rubinius VM

github.com

57 pointsDanielRibeiro12 comments

I'm starting to wonder if Rubinius could be a fourth entrant in the emerging platform race.

Anyone know if there are any (other) serious language implementations using PEGs? Coffeescript itself is based on @zaach's jison (a port of Bison to javascript) so that part is as impressive to me as using a native VM.

Edit: I remember that Cucumber (or, more specifically, gherkin) used TreeTop before Aslak moved it to the Ragel parser.

I don't know about implementations using PEGs, but I do know that the parser is possibly the least interesting thing about a virtual machine.

I don't disagree. Though, the post is about a new language that compiles down to an existing VMs instruction set :) That's not been done before in Coffeescript (as far as I know) but its also noteworthy because a PEG (which facilitates transforming syntax and semantics into a program using the VM instruction set) was used.

Javascript itself has also been compiled against a VM before. See: Rhino, IronJS.

CLR, JVM... what's the third?

JavaScript, I'd say.

Parrot (http://www.parrot.org/)

Almost every Perl 6 implementation implements their parser using Perl 6 regexes(partly because it's much more difficult to properly support the extensible grammar otherwise), which are essentially PEGs.

Very nice! Execution will of course be slower then running the translated coffeescript on the v8 vm. But for some use cases this will not matter.

This could be a good opportunity to add fibers natively. That would really clean up the language.

Why Rubinius VM? Why not V8 or spidermonkey?

Because CoffeeScript already builds to Javascript?

Beyond already compiling to Javascript as udp mentioned, the author (Brian Ford) is a frequent contributor to Rubinius and has already written other languages on top of it. Makes quite a bit of sense, in that regard.

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