1. What is Rubinius

Rubinius is a next-generation virtual machine and compiler for Ruby.  Based
loosely on the Smalltalk-80 'Blue Book' design, Rubinius will provide a rich,
high-performance environment for running Ruby code.

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 basic Ruby
classes and kernel methods. The code base is written in a mixture of ANSI C and
Ruby; with more Ruby and less C as the project proceeds.  You should not run
your mission-critical Rails apps under Rubinius yet.

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

Rubinius currently uses C to bootstrap the system. In the future, a limited
dialect of Ruby called cuby/garnet will be used to generate C. This is a
time-honored technique, used by systems such as Squeak, Smalltalk, and Algol on
the Burroughs systems (as seen in the movie 'Tron').

For now, this code is hand-written, and can be found in the ./shotgun/lib
directory.  This code was ported from a Ruby implementation found in the ./lib
directory.  For example, shotgun/lib/object_memory.c is the C translation of
lib/object_memory.rb.

The compiler, assembler, and bytecode generators are all written in Ruby, and
can be found under the ./lib directory.  Other systems use the word
'translator' for what is here referred to as 'compiler'.  The ./bin/rcc script
can be used to display the symbolic output of the compiler, for debugging or
learning purposes.