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Comment by kunley | Hacker News Reader

I just connected the dots. You're the guy who constructed a direct Ruby-to-assembly compiler some time ago, right?

Yeah, it's languished for years. I did a stint last autumn to get it to start passing more of Rubyspec, but haven't had time to take it further.

github.com/vidarh/writing-a-compiler-in-ruby

It's self-hosting apart from the GC (which is a sore spot - I really want to rewrite the GC in Ruby too), glibc for a handful of functions and syscalls, and using gas/ld to assemble and link.

No worries. My impression was, the premise of your articles was not (at least not initially) a compiler for a fullest Ruby with all of its intricacies, but rather showing a great technique how to tackle a problem. For me and few of my pals it was an inspiring eye-opener. We were coming from the 8bit era and had our hands dirty in assembly before, yet your approach showed we can do a lot of low-level stuff in a modern Unix setup.

Kudos for your work - and I guess you've had a lot of fun as well

Appreciate it. Yeah, you're right - when I started I didn't even plan on doing a Ruby compiler at all, just a compiler in Ruby. But I was also obsessing over the difficulty of compiling Ruby, and so was tempted to see how far it would get.

I'd really like to find time to pick it up again and clean it up and I'm toying with dynamic workflows in Claude now and might just have it set up one to "burn down" rubyspecs, as it did fairly well last autumn at fixing things, including adding bignum and beginnings of Regexp support.

Getting from working to usable and fast, though, would be a lot of work.

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