RubyComp: A Ruby-to-LLVM Compiler Prototype (Anders Alexandersson, M.S. Thesis)
Abstract:
Dynamic programming languages are not generally precompiled, but are interpreted at run-time. This approach has some serious drawbacks, e.g. complex deployment, human readable source code not preserving the intellectual properties of the developers and no ability to do optimizations at compile-time or run-time.
In this paper we study the possibility to precompile the Ruby language, a dynamic object-oriented language, into Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) code for execution by the LLVM run-time, a compiler framework for lifelong optimization of an application. The result of the project is a Ruby compiler prototype, describing the infrastructure and overall design principles to map the highly dynamic properties of the Ruby language into low-level static constructs of the LLVM language.
The LLVM framework supports different hardware platforms, and by using LLVM as the target of compilation the benefits of that portability are gained.
