Rubinius

Use Ruby™

An environment for the Ruby programming language providing performance, accessibility, and improved programmer productivity

Download

The current version Rubinius is 1.2.3

1.2.3 archive

Or

Use binary installers for

OS X 10.6 or OS X 10.5

Or

You can use HEAD Rubinius directly.

Clone Git

Build

To run from the source directory

  1. ./configure
  2. rake

Or
To install

  1. ./configure --prefix=/a/b/c
  2. rake install

Feedback

Issue Tracker

We apologize in advance for any bugs. Please take the time to open an issue about your problem. Include your CPU / operating system, the command you tried to run, and all the output to your terminal.

Have Fun & Enjoy!

We're very excited you're interested in Rubinius. What started as a toy grew into a labour of love. We love building Rubinius and hope you'll love using it. We need your feedback to make Rubinius the best it can be. You can reach us in the IRC channel at #rubinius on freenode.net, via Twitter or on the mailing list.

How Can I Contribute To Rubinius?

It's easy! Just download the source for rubinius, build it, and type "rbx docs". This will pop up a web browser for the embedded documentation. This will walk you through writing a patch and ticket.

If there is any confusion, just stop by IRC ( #rubinius on irc.freenode.net ) or post to the mailing list and we'll be happy to get you going!

Highlevel, what is Rubinius?

Extensive Built in Functionality

Simple Platform Integration

Object Oriented

Automatic Memory Management

Efficient Code Execution

Rubinius High Level Overview

Rubinius is software that translates the code for the Ruby programming language such as

puts "hello world"

and turns it into efficient machine code like this

push %rbp; mov %rsp, %rbp; push %rbx; subq $0x98, %rsp; cmp $0x0, 0x10(%rcx); call 0xffffffffff472010; jmp 0x9c; …

then executes it.

A large aspect of popular languages such as C and Java is that the majority of the functionality available to the programmer is written in the language itself. Rubinius has the goal of adding Ruby to that list. Rubyists could more easily add features to the language, fix bugs, and learn how the language works. Wherever possible Rubinius is written in Ruby. Where not possible (yet), it's C++.

Technically, what is Rubinius?

Rubinius is an implementation of the Ruby programming language.

The Rubinius bytecode virtual machine is written in C++, incorporating LLVM to compile bytecode to machine code at runtime. The bytecode compiler and vast majority of the core classes are written in pure Ruby.

To interact with the rest of the system, the VM provides primitives which can be attached to methods and invoked. Additionally, FFI provides a direct call path to most C functions.

Rubinius uses a precise, compacting, generational garbage collector. It includes a compatible C-API for C extensions written for the standard Ruby interpreter (often referred to as MRI—Matz's Ruby Implementation).

Reflection APIs

Foreign Function Interface

Kernel

Bytecode Compiler

The Acronym Layer

GC

JIT

VM

Primitives

C API

The Rubinius Nitty Gritty

How compatible is Rubinius?

From the start, compatibility has been critical to us. To that end, we created the RubySpec to ensure that we maintained parity with official Ruby. We are currently at a 93% RubySpec pass rate and growing everyday.

For now Rubinius is targeting MRI 1.8.7 (1.9 is on the post 1.0 list). Most Gems, Rails plugins and C-Extensions work right out of the box. If you find a bug, let us know and we'll get on top of it.

Compatible, Right Now

  • Rails
  • Rake
  • RSpec
  • IRB
  • Nokogiri
  • YAML
  • Mongrel
  • MySQL
  • Yajl-JSON
  • And many more…