llvmruby.org

Thanks to Christian Plessl getting gemification started, llvmruby is now available as a gem install from github. LLVM itself is still a separate install and build. This will probably remain true as LLVM is huge and takes forever to compile. Including it with every version of a gem seems ridiculous. The other good news is that LLVM 2.4 is due out at the end of the month at which point we will be targeting a real non-development version!

To install as a gem, you need to be able to install gems from github.

1. Upgrade to at least 1.2 of rubygems
2. Add github as a gem source: gem source -a http://gems.github.com
3. Make sure that you have built LLVM, that you built it with –enable-pic, and that llvm-config is in your path
4. gem install tombagby-llvmruby

Now just:

require 'rubygems'
require 'llvm'

And you are good to go!

I’ve been busy with my day job and not so busy on llvmruby. I got more interested in writing a static compiler for a type-inferred subset of Ruby ala RPython than in the YARV/JIT work I was doing so got a little distracted. Fortunately, open-source software lets others move in and pick up the slack and today I noticed a new yarv2llvm project on github which looks like it’s already yielded some interesting results.

As far as development on llvmruby itself, I added more complete floating point and casting support in response to some requests from Christoffer Lernö who was also kind enough to write some preliminary documentation. I also received some nice patches from Christian Plessl and Marc-Andre Cournoyer. It’s very satisfying to see that kind of support from the community.

I wish it was easier to communicate with the Japanese side of the Ruby community as I’ve noticed some interesting things like this (seemingly successful) effort to get llvmruby to work on Windows under Cygwin. Time to try contacting and crossing the language barrier I guess.