evanphx / rubinius

1. What is Rubinius

Rubinius is an execution environment for the Ruby programming language.  It is
comprised of three major pieces: a compiler, a 'kernel' (otherwise known as
the Ruby Core Library), and a virtual machine. The project's goal is to create
a top-of-the-line Ruby implementation.

2. License

Rubinius uses the BSD license. See LICENSE for details.

3. Running Rubinius

See doc/getting_started.txt.

3.1. For the impatient

Now to configure with LLVM: "./configure --enable-llvm"

This will try to download a prebuilt version of llvm for your system. If it
can't find a prebuilt version, then it will at the very least checkout LLVM
from svn and built it during the next step (this takes a lot of time).

  or

To configure without the JIT: "./configure"

Now: "rake"

4. Status

Rubinius is under heavy development and currently supports the core Ruby
classes and kernel methods. The majority of the existing Ruby libraries should
run without modification.  If your MRI 1.8.6-compatible code does not run
under Rubinius, please open a bug ticket. See doc/howto/write_a_ticket.txt.

As Rubinius becomes more and more compatible with Ruby 1.8, the development
effort is shifting toward performance, rather than completeness.

5. Goals

* Thread safety. Rubinius intends to be thread-safe so you could embed more
  than one interpreter in a single application. It does not currently meet
  this goal due to some components borrowed from the mainline Ruby interpreter.

* Clean, readable code that is easy for users to understand and extend.

* Reliable, rock-solid code. Valgrind is used to help verify correctness.

* Bring modern techniques to the Ruby runtime. Pluggable garbage collectors and
  code optimizers are possible examples.

6. Tickets

See doc/howto/write_a_ticket.txt

7. Contributing

The Rubinius team welcomes contributions, bug reports, test cases, and
monetary support. One possible way to help is implement Ruby library classes.
See doc/contributing.txt to get started.

8. Architecture

While most of the Rubinius features are implemented in Ruby, the VM itself is
written in C++. This is likely to continue to be the case in the coming
months, partly to ease the integration of LLVM into the Rubinius system.

The compiler, assembler, and bytecode generators are all written in Ruby, and
can be found under the ./kernel/compiler directory.