[MacRuby-devel] experimental branch: status update

[Laurent Sansonetti]

A status update on the recent progresses on the experimental branch!  
Last week did not see a status update, mea culpa.

- A new C/Objective-C dispatcher has been written. The idea is to use  
LLVM to compile stubs instead of using libffi. The previous libffi- 
based implementation is no longer used (yay for performance!) and we  
are able to run most of the C/Objective-C APIs. According to some  
early benchmarks, the new dispatcher is about 8 times faster than  
trunk, and about 3 times slower than pure Objective-C, so it's very  
promising. Getting rid of libffi was the goal, because it's very slow.

- C structures covered by BridgeSupport annotations are also exposed,  
providing the exact same behavior as in trunk. The implementation is  
however new, since we no longer use libffi to represent them.

Thanks to these changes, we are able to run some MacRuby Cocoa scripts  
(like hello world).

- More work on the LLVM interpreter usage: we were able to plug some  
of the VM primitives into it and therefore interpret naive  
expressions. If everything goes well we could use it to run simple  
expressions instead of using the JIT, which should accelerate the load  
of large libraries (and make #eval a lot faster).

- The ultra lazy JIT is now enabled by default. A couple of specs are  
now failing and will be investigated later, but on average it works  
great.

- We started writing specs for MacRuby-specific behaviors (currently  
66 examples and 305 expectations).

- All 1.9 multiple assignment scenarios should now be implemented.

- RubySpec was upgraded from the upstream version.

- A RubyFFI-compatible API is under development. It uses the new C  
dispatcher functionality under the covers. Currently most types are  
supported except :pointer, structures (and maybe more). The cool thing  
about this API is that it's implemented in different versions of Ruby,  
so we should be able to reuse existing Ruby libraries based on it,  
until we support MRI C extensions.

Laurent