COcookrn·Mar 28, 2014
Fancy[0] is one of the most mature languages on the VM other than Ruby I believe.
[0] https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy
In GNU Guile 2.0.10bakkdoor
fancy
Fancy2011–2014
bakkdoor / fancy
fancy
Fancy is a dynamic, object-oriented programming language inspired by Smalltalk, Ruby, Io and Erlang that runs on the Rubinius VM.
6Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
262GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Fancy is a dynamic, object-oriented programming language inspired by Smalltalk, Ruby, Io and Erlang that runs on the Rubinius VM.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- vic/typhon · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year7 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2011-02-24 03:46:55 UTC to 2014-03-28 01:30:22 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
7 sourcesUnfortunately, many of these VMs don't offer a peak under the hood at runtime. For instance, V8 doesn't have any bytecode or IR you can compile to and run. JavaScript, and asm.js is the lowest you can go.
If you want to target an IR language, you can try LLVM. Although it's not a VM, you can definitely implement your own language on-top of it. It'd be pretty low-level.
Other alternatives are Ruby VMs, such as Rubinius, which actually uses the LLVM JIT compiler. Rubinius is pretty fast (I have never used it myself) and it has it's own bytecode format, so you can easily compile your own language to it.
Fancy (https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy) is a great example of this. It compiles to Rubinius bytecode and executes it within the virtual machine.
In Optimize your JS with IRHydra 2 for V8This is a great overview about the two interpreters! However, I think you're being a bit inaccurate about how flexible the Rubinius VM is. It is certainly more than flexible enough to support a wide variety of non-Ruby languages.
The core Rubinius team bas been working towards a language-agnostic core, and toolchains for building your own language on top of the Rubinius VM. See http://rubini.us/2011/02/17/rubinius-what-s-next/#multi-lang... and http://rubini.us/2011/02/23/introduction-to-fancy/
There are already a good number of language projects that build upon it: http://rubini.us/projects/ Fancy is one of the more mature languages built on it (and it's self-hosted): https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy. Note that Fancy was originally written as an interpreter in C++ - they ported it to the Rubinius VM at a later point.
There's even a
Read the rest
n (immature) Python that runs on top of it: https://github.com/vic/typhon.
This is a great overview about the two interpreters! However, I think you're being a bit inaccurate about how flexible the Rubinius VM is. It is certainly more than flexible enough to support a wide variety of non-Ruby languages.
The core Rubinius team bas been working towards a language-agnostic core, and toolchains for building your own language on top of the Rubinius VM. See http://rubini.us/2011/02/17/rubinius-what-s-next/#multi-lang... and http://rubini.us/2011/02/23/introduction-to-fancy/
There are already a good number of language projects that build upon it: http://rubini.us/projects/ Fancy is one of the more mature languages built on it (and it's self-hosted): https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy. There's even an (immature) Python that runs on top of it: https://github.com/vic/typhon.
In PyPy 1.6 Released - Full Python 2.7.1 Implementationapparently it's not documented but there is some code in the examples lib in github. It looks more like Io than erlang to me.
https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy/blob/master/examples/async...
https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy/blob/master/examples/futur...
https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy/blob/master/examples/futur...
In Fancy a self-hosted programming language for the Rubinius VMBtw, here's a list of current features I forgot to link to in the post: https://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy/blob/master/doc/features.m...
In Fancy: first bootstrapped language targeting Rubinius VM other than Ruby