The Ruby Intermediate Language ∗ Michael Furr Jong-hoon (David) An Jeffrey S. Foster Michael Hicks University of Maryland, College Park ffurr,davidan,jfoster,
[email protected] Abstract syntax that is almost ambiguous, and a semantics that includes Ruby is a popular, dynamic scripting language that aims to “feel a significant amount of special case, implicit behavior. While the natural to programmers” and give users the “freedom to choose” resulting language is arguably easy to use, its complex syntax and among many different ways of doing the same thing. While this ar- semantics make it hard to write tools that work with Ruby source guably makes programming in Ruby easier, it makes it hard to build code. analysis and transformation tools that operate on Ruby source code. In this paper, we describe the Ruby Intermediate Language In this paper, we present the Ruby Intermediate Language (RIL), (RIL), an intermediate language designed to make it easy to ex- a Ruby front-end and intermediate representation that addresses tend, analyze, and transform Ruby source code. As far as we are these challenges. RIL includes an extensible GLR parser for Ruby, aware, RIL is the only Ruby front-end designed with these goals in and an automatic translation into an easy-to-analyze intermediate mind. RIL provides four main advantages for working with Ruby form. This translation eliminates redundant language constructs, code. First, RIL’s parser is completely separated from the Ruby in- unravels the often subtle ordering among side effecting operations, terpreter, and is defined using a Generalized LR (GLR) grammar, and makes implicit interpreter operations explicit.