Irb on Rubinius
There are cat people and dog people, but when I say “Man’s best friend”, I don’t mean either. I’m talking about that program that feels like a home away from home: irb. So, I’ve been chomping at the bit to get something resembling irb running with Rubinius.
Today, a few of us pdx.rb folks got together for some Rubinius hacking. Of course, irb was one of the things I proposed that we work on. We had a go at it, but in the end we didn’t get too far. irb is no trivial application. But, I think a good part of it was my fault. I’ve been working on these specs for so long, where at the moment we’re forced to send everything to rubinius in a subprocess, that I failed to grasp that we would have a persistent machine. Anyway, let’s cut this short: Folks, we have a rudimentary sirb!
sirb(eval):0> class Hello
sirb(eval):1> def greet
sirb(eval):2> puts "Hello, irb!"
sirb(eval):3> end
sirb(eval):4> end
=> nil
sirb(eval):5> Hello.new.greet
=> Hello, irb!
["Hello, irb!"]
sirb(eval):6> @s = "Hello, earthling"
=> "Hello, earthling"
sirb(eval):7> p @s
=> "Hello, earthling"
["Hello, earthling"]
sirb(eval):8> Hello
=> Hello
sirb(eval):9> Hello.class
=> Class
sirb(eval):10> Hello.new
=> #<Hello:0x6696cc>
sirb(eval):11>
In the words of Napolean Dynamite: Sweet. Of course, it is pretty rough right now. You’ll notice the use of an instance variable, @a. That’s because I couldn’t figure out how to get local variables to work. Basically, everything is evaluating with the default receiver being an instance of Object.
Well, warts and all, I think it’s a beautiful thing.
