mruby

mruby

Developer(s)	Yukihiro Matsumoto et al.
Stable release	1.2.0 / November 18, 2015
Development status	Active
Written in	C and Ruby
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Ruby programming language interpreter
License	MIT License
Website	mruby.org

mruby is an interpreter for the Ruby programming language with the intention of being lightweight and easily embeddable.^[1][2] The project is headed by Yukihiro Matsumoto, with over 100 contributors currently working on the project.

Features

mruby 1.0 supports the Ruby 2.1 core API but none of the standard library. As well as being able to execute most basic Ruby code, mruby also features a bytecode compiler and virtual machine, as well as the ability to be easily embedded and integrated into C or C++ code, in a similar manner to Lua or Tcl.

mruby also aims to be compliant with the ISO/IEC 30170:2012 standard.^[1]

Examples

Calling mruby from C

#include <stdio.h>
#include <mruby.h>
#include <mruby/compile.h>

int main(void) {
    mrb_state *mrb = mrb_open();
    char code[] = "5.times { puts 'mruby is awesome!' }";

    printf("Executing Ruby code with mruby:\n");
    mrb_load_string(mrb, code);

    mrb_close(mrb);
    return 0;
}

Assuming that you have mruby installed and in your path, the following program can be compiled and executed by running the following command from your terminal:^[3]

$ cc example.c -lmruby -lm -o example
$ ./example

Precompiled Bytecode

mruby includes a minimalistic virtual machine used to execute mruby bytecode, nicknamed ritevm:

$ mrbc test.rb
$ mruby -b test.mrb

The first command compiles Ruby code to mruby bytecode, creating a file called "test.mrb", which can then be executed by appending the "-b" flag to the normal interpreter arguments.^[4]

References

1. "mruby/mruby". GitHub. Retrieved 2013-12-29.
2. mruby and MobiRuby announced
3. Aimonetti, Matt (2012-04-25). "Getting started with mruby". Retrieved 2013-12-29.
4. geekmonkey (2012-10-30). "An introduction to Mini Ruby". Retrieved 2013-12-29.