Ruby Extensions vs. Smalltalk Primitives
Posted by Rick DeNatale Mon, 04 Jun 2007 14:16:00 GMT
One of the ways in which Ruby differs from Smalltalk is in how much of the implementation is buried in C, which forms a barrier for deep understanding.
For the purposes of this article, I’m going to use the term extension a little loosely to refer to both core library and extension code written in C.
For example, in Ruby, much of the code which implements core classes like Array, is implemented by C code. This is good for performance, but for those with a need or desire to grok the code, not so much. In contrast, Smalltalk has a large brigade of Collection classes which are written in Smalltalk.
This is not to say that Smalltalk doesn’t use the equivalent of extensions. Smalltalk calls them primitives.
There are some interesting differences which might be interesting for the Ruby Core team to ponder, if they haven’t already.
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