Gem of a programming language
Hello All, I am Thierry Uso, a telecom consultant. In my spare time, I port open source software on the OpenVMS/Itanium platform. In this post, I present my port of JRuby 1.4.0.
JRuby (http://jruby.org/) is an implementation of the Ruby programming language on top of a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). JRuby consists of a Ruby interpreter written entirely in Java and a full AOT/JIT compiler which compiles Ruby code to Java bytecode.
JRuby 1.4.0 supports Ruby 1.8.7 and partially 1.9. Porting this JRuby version was an easy task: No modification of the JRuby code was necessary. The startup scripts of the JRuby tools (interpreter, compiler, console, gem…) were re-written in DCL with the accurate settings of logical names and JVM parameters (http://vmsfree.ouvaton.org/freen/index.php?s=jruby).
JRuby is currently the only way to run modern Ruby applications on an OpenVMS/Itanium platform since no recent version of MRI (the Ruby interpreter written in C) exists on that platform. I performed some preliminary tests which show fair response times but feedback is welcome.
-Thierry Uso