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---
date: "2006-01-12T21:10:33Z"
title: Charming Ruby Compiler, Not So Charming
---
<p>Earlier this month on the <code>ruby-core</code> mailing list there was a post
about the <a href="http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d00farre/thesis/">Charming Ruby Compiler (CRC)</a>, which looks promising.
It's a preliminary <a href="http://ruby-lang.org/">Ruby</a> to <a href="http://cminusminus.org/">C--</a> compiler. Unfortunately, it's
also got <a href="http://gnome.org/">GNOME</a>-style dependencies (i.e. from hell). You can grab a
pre-compiled binary for <a href="http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d00farre/thesis/">CRC</a>, but the <a href="http://cminusminus.org/">C--</a> compiler itself depends
on both <a href="http://caml.inria.fr/">Objective CAML</a> and <a href="http://lua.org/">Lua</a>.</p>
<p>For some reason, I just don't feel like installing the runtime and
development libraries for <em>three</em> separate programming languages just to
try out a preliminary compiler for <em>one</em> programming language.</p>
<p>The thread wasn't a total loss, however. I learned about both <a href="http://nekovm.org/">Neko</a>
and <a href="http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/">LLVM</a>, and they both look interesting. <a href="http://nekovm.org/">Neko</a> is a lightweight
<acronym title='Virtual Machine'>VM</acronym> for dynamic languages
(like <a href="http://ruby-lang.org/">Ruby</a> and <a href="http://python.org/">Python</a>) written in <acronym title='American
Netional Standards Institute'>ANSI</acronym> C. Instead of targeting
assembly, and compiling that to bytecode, <a href="http://nekovm.org/">Neko</a> provides it's own
low-level programming language with primitives for things like strings,
numbers, and objects. Seems like <a href="http://nekovm.org/">Neko</a> has a lower barrier to entry
than <a href="http://parrotcode.org/">Parrot</a>, although the lack of an encoding attribute for string
elements kind of bothers me -- maybe that's something higher-level
languages are supposed to take care of?</p>
<p>On another note, I've generated the
<acronym title='HyperText Markup Language'>HTML</acronym> for
this post using <a href="http://www.deveiate.org/projects/BlueCloth">BlueCloth</a>, a <a href="http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/">Markdown</a> processor for <a href="http://ruby-lang.org/">Ruby</a>.
If you can get over the funky bracket syntax for links, <a href="http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/">Markdown</a>
does seem to make writing posts a whole lot easier. All I need now is a
decent post-processor for acronyms and I'd be set. Maybe I'll come up
with something for my new page backend, if it ever gets completed.</p>
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