Grubby is an experimental ruby written in Golang
Sure, why not? I've been interested in implementing a language for several years now and have finally reached a point where I feel comfortable exploring the idea further. While rewriting a ruby project in golang, I joked to some coworkers about just writing a Ruby implementation in Go to speed up our efforts; eventually the joke became real.
Golang doesn't always feel like the best language to implement another language in. I do enjoy that it feels like a very modern C (albeit one without guarantees on how long any function can take because of heap allocation and GC). Ultimately, my goal is to learn more about Golang and Ruby through this project. If I find out that Golang is not ideal for implementing other languages, then that is fine.
Just run bin/test from the root directory. This builds the necessary files (currently just the parser) with goyacc first.
I'm currently trying to get rubyspec to run against grubby, which requires a small, but sizeable amount of behavior initially. Run bin/rubyspec and you should be able to see the next behavior that needs to be implemented there.
Unfortunately, that's not very easy to parallelize between multiple people. Feel free to write a test on the VM for the functionality you'd like to implement. If you're comfortable implementing it as well, that's great, otherwise a pull request to discuss how it might work is more than welcome. :)
Some great things to work on include:
- line numbers in stack traces
- more builtin classes and methods (anything on Class, Kernel, Module, Object, etc... honestly)
- raising and rescuing from exceptions
- while loops
- blocks
If you're not sure where to start, opening up a pull request is also fine. :)