fancy on rubinius

8/8/2019 Fancy on Rubinius

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FancyRuby and Rails

European Conference 2010

Christopher [email protected]


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Motivation

Many Language implementations

Not very well documented

Hard to read and understand if you're new to this stuff

Lots of magic

Fancy

Focus on documentation for potential language implementors

Easy and simple semantics Newcomer friendly

Having fun working on the implementation side

Not just as a language end-user


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Inspiration: Smalltalk

All values are Objects

Pure message sending

Small amount of special keywords and syntax

Simple message sending semantics

Dynamic, class-based OO

Metaprogramming

Reflective


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Inspiration: Ruby

File based (instead of image based as Smalltalk)

Embrace Unix

TIMTOWTDI

Similar literal syntax

Class definition is executable script

Stuff similar toattr_accessoretc.

But: Fixed some inconsistencies within Ruby

e.g. Blocks Procs Lambdas


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Inspiration: Erlang

Lock-free concurrency

Message passing concurrency semantics

Light-weight processes

Note: Still needs to be implemented


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Quick Feature Overview

Literal syntax

Arrays, Hashes, Blocks (Closures), Classes,Regular Expressions, Symbols, Integers, Floats

Ruby integration via Ruby-like syntax for callingRuby methods

Local & Nonlocal returns

Exception Handling (including retry) Standard library entirely written in Fancy

Much more ...


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First Class is good

Classes, Methods, ...

Object Documentation

Classes

Methods

Tests (Runnable Documentation)


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FancySpec

One of the first things implemented in Fancy

Simplified clone of RSpec

~ 200 lines of Fancy

Tests for all built-in classes & methods

Implementation independent

Used for the old interpreter to test it

Used exactly the same way to test the newimplementation on Rubinius


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FancySpec


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FancySpecDEMO


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Classes & Methods


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Blocks

Ruby has some weird inconsistencies

Example: Symbol to Proc

vs:


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A little bit of history...


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C++ Interpreter

GNU Bison & Flex for parser

Boehm GC

Closures (Blocks)

Built-in native methods written in C++

Little magic

Not so good performance... C++ is ugly :(


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Move to Rubinius

Great platform for dynamic, object-orientedlanguages like Ruby or Fancy

Modern VM implementation based on Smalltalk

and Self JIT compiler using LLVM

FFI interface

Stdlib of Ruby written in Ruby (and not in C or C++) You should've listened to Dirkjans talk yesterday or

ask him for more detailed questions about Rubinius


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Move to Rubinius

Compiler chain for Ruby written in Ruby

Very reusable & modular

rbx bytecode is easy to read & understand

Good tooling support

Debugger

Good backtraces Meaningful error messages (!)


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Some comparing stats


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C++ Interpreter Rubinius

13,500 lines of C++

3000 lines of Fancy

~ 6-7 months of work

by me

800 lines of C(parser & lexer)

2000 lines of Ruby

(Compiler) 4500 lines of Fancy

~ 3 Weeks of work

with 2-3 people ~ 90% ported already


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Some explanations


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Reasons for development speed

FancySpecs

Good compiler tools & library in Rubinius writtenin Ruby

Quite ruby-agnostic (at least to some degree)bytecode format & vm

Rewriting always takes shorter than the first

prototype :) Ruby is fundamentally a Smalltalk dialect

Many similar lower-level concepts


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Quick lookat the new implementation


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Initial compiler pipeline

PassesRSexp

(pipe)

rbx compiler(Ruby)

rbx bytecodefiles(.fyc)

Fancy InterpreterFancy source

Files(.fy)

24

Run bytecodefiles with rbx

1

3


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New compiler pipeline

rbxbytecode compiler

rbx bytecodefiles(.fyc)

5

1

3

Fancy sourceFiles(.fy)

bin/fancy(ruby script on rbx)

Run bytecodefiles with rbx

Fancy::CodeLoader

2

4


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bin/fancy


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CompilerDEMO


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Rubyintegration


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DEMOCompiler In Detail


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Future plans

Built-in concurrency semantics Actors

Futures (as in Io: f = obj @ foo)

STM? Tight integration with Ruby:

Easily using this stuff in both languages

Parser experimentation

e.g. Indentation-based grammar Less curly braces! Bootstrapping the compiler

More Fancy, less Ruby.


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Future plans

Compiler optimizations

Signals/Restarts & Continuations

Beg the Rubinius guys to implement them again

More & better documentation Documentation as first-class concept in the language

Programming In Fancy.An OpenSource Book to teach the FancyProgramming Language.

http://github.com/vic/infancy


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We're very open to discussion on anything relatedto the language, its features or semantics.

It's about the fun after all.


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Summary

Simple and small language implementation Easy to get started with

It's fun :)


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Thanks to

Rubinius Team for such a great platform! Fancy's collaborators:

Victor Hugo Borja

Nils Haldenwang

Jose Narvaez


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http://fancy-lang.org

http://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy

#fancy @ irc.freenode.net

Questions?

fancy on rubinius

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