The Dailyish IRC Newsletter, 2007.02.09-11
Posted by rue, Mon Feb 12 20:33:00 UTC 2007
As an administrative note, these summaries are now available on the Web, too.
The process is manual so expect some propagation delay.
New people:
- scoopr: Not much is known about this reclusive creature that dwells in the cold regions of Northern Europe.
- imperator: Daniel Berger
On to the topics!
- Future of the parser
We were just idly speculating about the future of parsing Ruby scripts in Rubinius. As you may know, the Bison grammar used by MRI are actually currently actively hindering some syntax improvements to it (and it is likely going to be a problem for us as well.)
A few options have been tossed around, most prominently ANTLR for which a C backend exists and the XRuby people have kindly already written a BSD-licenced grammar as a part of the Rubyfront project.
Alternatives include the currently en-vogue Kelbt as well as variants of the PEG parsing scheme.
- Symbols now complete
The past weekend there was a lot of chatter from mainly me talking to myself about dynamic Symbol processing in the parser. First with cabo’s kind assistance we got all literal Symbols to function right and when I finally gave up and kludged a bit, dynamics work fine and get compiled right. The only missing part is that some Symbols have an #inspect string that differs from MRI.
- Mathematical developments
scoopr is diving in to Rubinius development and starting it by reproducing the Math module from Core!
mae and brixen have, at length, talked out how different aspects of the numerical system should work; Floats in particular. Topics of interest have been various methods, the role of NaN, IEEE and coercion and so on.
- Got irb.
brixen and a cadre of folks from (I believe) the pdx.rb group got a start on getting sirb (shotgun irb, simple irb, whatever) to work again and have succeeded! It is limited but bin/sirb.rb will let you do a bit of playing-around.
- FastMethodContext!
evan uploaded his FastMethodContext implementation as a branch. To take a peek at it and help with debugging, head over to
svn co http://code.fallingsnow.net/svn/rubinius/branches/fmc
(Or of course just svn up if you already have trunk and braches.)
- Lair of the Test Monster
My superior interrogation technique of just asking about it got imperator to reveal the location of his secret testing site.
- http://rubyforge.org/viewvc/ruby_test/?root=shards
Certainly something to look into.
- Fiscal policies
As an aside, imperator wondered about rounding up some venture capitalists. I expressed some scepticism and a preference for free money but he seemed fairly confident. Perhaps he is right!
- Writings
mae started a blog on his http://mattelder.org.
- rubini.us downtime
The site is back up now.
The Rubinius IRC channel is #rubinius on Freenode. Join us!