How can a language be interpreted by itself (like Rubinius)?

Posted by japancheese on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by japancheese
Published on 2010-05-30T06:01:04Z Indexed on 2010/05/30 6:02 UTC
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Filed under:

ruby

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compiler

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language-design

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rubinius

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self-interpreter

I've been programming in Ruby for a while now with just the standard MRI implementation of Ruby, but I've always been curious about the other implementations I hear so much about.

I was reading about Rubinius the other day, a Ruby interpreter written in Ruby. I tried looking it up in various places, but I was having a hard time figuring out exactly how something like this works. I've never had much experience in compilers or language writing but I'm really interested to figure it out.

How exactly can a language be interpreted by itself? Is there a basic step in compiling that I don't understand where this makes sense? Can someone explain this to me like I'm an idiot (because that wouldn't be too far off base anyways)

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