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Lightstorm: Minimalistic Ruby Compiler

blog.llvm.org

146 pointseutropia19 comments

DragonRuby is incredible and the community is wildly supportive. Love that this is getting traction on HN. Ruby is really having a renaissance.

I just switched a month ago to doing gamedev in dragonruby and it's been a real positive move. Hot reloading of the script while the game is running at its current state has allowed me to debug faster and try new features or ideas (should jump be 7.5? try 7.8. maybe 7.75)

Love that! Amir and crew are very responsive on Discord as well, which makes a DX difference.

>Ruby is really having a renaissance.

Any projects/resources to check? I'll start using ruby at work and I could use some recommendations to properly get into the language.

That’s one of the beautiful things about the massive Ruby ecosystem: the answer to that question is almost always yes, regardless of your need.

I’m not sure what your line of work is, but if you’re doing web dev, check this out for a great primer on the current state of things (Rails 8 + Hotwire): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cEn_83zRFw

If you’d prefer just some straight Ruby resources, Ruby Warrior is (or was, been a while since I’ve used it but it appears actively maintained still) a fun intro: https://github.com/ryanb/ruby-warrior

Awesome to see the progress made by Alex, highly recommend watching the linked talk for people interested in any of Ruby, (AoT) compilers, and MLIR (which I haven't seen used too much outside of the ML space, personally)

Fascinating, does the project aspire to become compatible with MRI Ruby? Also how many active Ruby implementations do we have so far?

Edit: Found this, https://github.com/codicoscepticos/ruby-implementations?tab=...

I'm curious if Crystal lang is not fit enough for the main task?

Which task? DragonRuby uses a custom mruby build to target cross platform game releases so their goal is to fit the Ruby lang spec, which Crystal does not adhere to.

> their goal is to fit the Ruby lang spec

I honestly thought that "ruby lang spec" was "whatever Matz ruby does." The ISO-IEC-30170 standard cited by mruby's readme seems to be laughably old but I can't obviously tell if mruby is a superset of the ISO or a subset. Their use of the phrase "part of the ISO standard" doesn't help

There's a full blown test suite for Ruby which the various implementations use: https://github.com/ruby/spec

Matz is the creator and maintainer of Ruby, yes. mruby is a subset to my knowledge, and I don't think it's 100% parity with Ruby MRI (CRuby), which is basically what the lang spec is built around to my knowledge.

Amir on why they didn't go with crystal

https://ruby.social/@amirrajan/113655343888344967

That's a bit light on the details, and I can't make any sense of "To use stdio even you literally need kernel-level privileges on Console.", C's stdio doesn't require special privileges to use, nor does Crystal's, afaik.

Maybe someone else will know that means.

I think Console is as in XBox or PlayStation, not as in the kind of application.

Ah, the use of Germanic uppercased nouns in English sent me the wrong way. Thanks.

More poignant examples would be `dirent.h` and `system`. Getting access to the file system on a console, or the ability to start up a process out of band is not allowed.

Ruby is great as the first language.

Productive as an engineer.

Expressive as a linguist.

Elegant as an artist.

Magic as a blackbox.

Succinct as math.

Peems.

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