Archive for July, 2011

Mirah Office Hours

Monday, July 25th, 2011

Mirah Office Hours Prep Jul 24th 2011 I had my regular Mirah office hours on Sunday.

This week I focused on getting all the tests passing for the patches that were merged earlier in the week, which were among the things that fell out of this big thread on the mailing list. One of the other things was that a number of people became collaborators on the repository (like me :D).

When trying to get tests working, I ran into some issues with JRuby and NailGun. RVM latest starts up a nailgun server by default when using JRuby, which is cool because it’s faster, but I had some problems. Essentially, Mirah’s compile scripts were attempting to run in NailGun’s home directory, which didn’t work very well…

I fixed it by setting JRUBY_OPT=””, which told JRuby not to send requests to NailGun. Better would be to chmod -x .rvm/hooks/after_use_jruby, which would additionally avoid starting a NailGun server. The best thing would be to figure out what happened and fix it in JRuby’s NailGun integration. Unfortunately, after I got Mirah’s test suite working, I couldn’t reproduce the issue with NailGun reenabled.

In the end, I got all the tests passing except the one for the new loop macro, which still has an inference error.

The new addition of a top_level? method on AST nodes cleaned things up pretty nicely by not requiring a script class unless there are things defined in the top level scope. Most of my changes dealt with that–fewer classes were generated out of the compiled code (commit).

I had fun fixing things, even though it was frustrating that I couldn’t get to the more interesting things I wanted to work on (closures, Dubious, Shatner). Maybe I’ll get to them on my next set of office hours.