Ruby MRI

Ruby

Developer(s)	Yukihiro Matsumoto (among others)
Stable release	1.9.2 / August 18, 2010; 14 months ago (2010-08-18)
Written in	C
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Ruby programming language interpreter
License	Ruby License GNU General Public License
Website	www.ruby-lang.org

Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby.

Matz's Ruby Interpreter or Ruby MRI (also called CRuby) is the reference implementation of the Ruby programming language. As there is currently no specification of the Ruby language, the MRI implementation is considered the de facto reference. The RubySpec project has created a large test suite that captures 1.8.6/1.8.7/1.9 behavior as a reference conformance tool. Ruby MRI 1.9.2 currently passes over 99% of RubySpec.^[1]

The latest stable version is Ruby 1.9.2^[1]. The developers included the virtual machine provided by the YARV project, which was merged into the Ruby source tree on December 31, 2006, and released as part of Ruby 1.9.

History

Yukihiro Matsumoto ("Matz") started working on Ruby on February 24, 1993, and released it to the public in 1995. "Ruby" was named as a gemstone because of a joke within Matsumoto's circle of friends alluding to the name of the Perl programming language.^[2]

The 1.8 branch is still maintained, and 1.8.7 releases have been released since April 2008^[3][4]. This version provides bug fixes, but also many Ruby feature enhancements.

The current stable version of the interpreter 1.9.2 was released^[1] on April 18, 2010. The 1.9 series added initial Unicode support, YARV with kernel threads (also known as native threads) ^[5] and significantly improved performance^[6] over 1.8.

Licensing terms

The Ruby interpreter and libraries are distributed disjointedly (dual licensed) under the free and open source licenses GPL and Ruby License.^[7]

Operating systems

Ruby MRI is available for the following operating systems:

• Acorn RISC OS
• Amiga
• BeOS
• DOS (32-bit)
• Internet Tablet OS
• Linux
• Mac OS X
• Microsoft Windows 95/98/2000/2003/NT/XP/Vista
• Microsoft Windows CE
• MorphOS
• OS/2
• OpenVMS
• Syllable
• Symbian OS
• Blue Gene/L compute node kernel
• Most flavors of Unix

This list may not be exhaustive.

Criticism

Commonly noted limitations include:

• Performance -- the Ruby interpreter's performance trails that of comparable languages such as Perl, and Python^[8][9], mainly due to the design of the interpreter: To execute Ruby code, the interpreter builds a syntax tree from the source code and then evaluates the syntax tree directly, instead of first compiling it into more efficiently executable form.
• Backward compatibility -- version 1.9 and 1.8 have slight semantic differences.^[10]

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} Ruby 1.9.2 is released
2. ^ An Interview with the Creator of Ruby
3. ^ Musha, Akinori (2008-05-26). "Ruby Core: Ruby 1.8.7-preview4 has been released". http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/154217#new. Retrieved 2008-05-30. "The new version of Ruby includes many bug fixes, lots of feature enhancements and some performance improvements since 1.8.6 while maintaining stability and backward compatibility with the previous release to a high degree, although there are ongoing efforts that need to be done toward adopting RubySpec." 
4. ^ "1.8.7 NEWS". http://svn.ruby-lang.org/repos/ruby/tags/v1_8_7_preview4/NEWS. Retrieved 2008-05-30. 
5. ^ The Ruby VM (Interview with Ruby VM creators)
6. ^ Ruby 1.9 - Computer Language Benchmarks Game comparison
7. ^ Ruby License (ruby-lang.org)
8. ^ Boxplot Summary | Ubuntu : Intel Q6600 Computer Language Benchmarks Game
9. ^ Ruby Performance Revisited - Joel on Software
10. ^ InfoQ: Ruby 1.9 released

External links

• Ruby language home page
• Writing C Extensions to Ruby (MRI 1.8)