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. Running Rubinius

Refer to the INSTALL file for instructions on getting and building Rubinius.

3. 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.

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

4. 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.

5. Volunteering to Help

The Rubinius team welcomes contributions, bug reports, test cases, and monetary
support. One possible way to help is implement Ruby library classes. Visit
http://rubinius.lighthouseapp.com for documentation on how to begin hacking
Rubinius.

6. 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 ./lib/compiler directory.