Ruby (programming Language) - Implementations

Implementations

The newest version of Ruby, the recently released version 1.9, has currently two working implementations:

• The official Ruby interpreter often referred to as the Matz's Ruby Interpreter or MRI. This implementation is written in C and uses its own Ruby-specific virtual machine,
• JRuby, a Java-based implementation that runs on the Java virtual machine

Ruby version 1.8 has another implementation called Rubinius, a reimplementation of Ruby focusing on writing as much of the core in Ruby as possible.

There are other less-known or upcoming implementations such as Cardinal (an implementation for the Parrot virtual machine), IronRuby (alpha version available since July 24, 2008), Ruby.NET, XRuby and HotRuby (runs Ruby source code on a web browser and Flash).

The maturity of Ruby implementations tends to be measured by their ability to run the Ruby on Rails (Rails) framework, because it is a complex framework to implement, and it uses many Ruby-specific features. The point when a particular implementation achieves this goal is called The Rails singularity. The reference implementation (MRI), JRuby, and Rubinius are all able to run Rails unmodified in a production environment. IronRuby is starting to be able to run Rails test cases, but is still far from being production-ready.

Ruby is available on many operating systems, such as Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Windows Phone, Windows CE and most flavors of Unix.

Ruby 1.9 has recently been ported onto Symbian OS 9.x.