[MacRuby-devel] WWDC

Laurent Sansonetti lsansonetti at apple.com
Sat May 30 12:51:35 PDT 2009


HI Martin,

On May 30, 2009, at 11:30 AM, Martin Hess wrote:

> Is there going to be any kind of MacRuby developer get together at  
> WWDC? It would be a chance for MacRuby developers/contributors/ 
> volunteers/users to meet and trade information on moving MacRuby  
> forward.

We unfortunately weren't able to get a dedicated lab this year, but I  
will be there the whole wednesday, so we can meet at any time and  
discuss. At the evening, there will be a drink (I realized I forgot to  
post a link here), if you want to join us feel free.

http://www.macruby.org/trac/wiki/MacRubyWWDC09

> Some subjects I would love to hear about:
>
> 1) Update on .5 and SL

If everything goes well, experimental should work on SL by the time  
the conference starts. But I'm moving offices next week so it might  
impact the development.

> 2) Bridge support innards, and future plans
> 3) Details on how MacRuby uses LLVM
>
> Some questions for MacRuby's future:
>
> 4) How far can MacRuby and LLVM go:
> 	- Can we do on the fly type inference and compile objects into  
> registers i.e. if you pass a float into a routine, can we JIT  
> compile a float version of the routine where the floats are  
> 'unboxed' and kept in registers for the scope of the routine/block
> 	- Can we cache different JIT compiled versions of the same routine  
> where the caller dispatches transparently to the correct version of  
> the routine depending on args
> 	- Since clang is just a library, can we call it from MacRuby for a  
> better inline C/C++/ObjC

The answer is yes to all questions. I also have a plan to recompile  
routines with inline stub calls to avoid calling the dispatcher. But  
this is all for the future.

> 5) LLVM is cross platform -- what would it take to get MacRuby  
> (RubyLLVM?) on Linux/*BSD

Making sure the dependencies, libobjc, libauto, some classes of CF  
(part of CFLite), LLVM and NSObject (we can create our own for this  
purpose) build and work. I think it's possible, it just requires  
someone with lots of patience willing to do the work.

> 6) Whats the plan for fibers

I did not think about fibers yet, but I have a plan for threads, which  
is the next big thing to implement in the new VM. I will expose it  
later if you want, but the basic goal is to have full concurrent  
threads.

Laurent


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