Ruby 0.95 was the first publicly released version of Ruby. It was originally published on December 21, 1995.
This is an attempt to get Ruby 0.95 to compile on a modern version of Linux (32-bit Ubuntu 16.04) using a modern compiler (GCC 5.4).
- Why do it? Mostly because I thought it would make for a fun talk at a Ruby meet-up or conference.
- Why Ubuntu 16.04? It's the last version of Ubuntu for which 32-bit images were published
- Why 32-bit? 64-bit desktop systems weren't really a thing back in 1995: the first x86-64/AMD64 CPU was released in 2003.
- Why Linux in the first place? My normal development computer is a Mac, but macOS/OS X wouldn't be released until 2001.
This has only been tested with Ubuntu 16.04 (with GCC 5.4), but other distros would probably work too.
- Install the build dependencies
sudo apt install autoconf bison build-essential flex git
- Clone this repo
git clone https://github.com/matiaskorhonen/ruby-0.95.git
cd ruby-0.95
- Make the destination folders (I'm assuming that you don't want to install this system-wide)
# Note that this is a different directory than the git repo
mkdir -p ~/opt/bin
mkdir -p ~/opt/lib/ruby
- Configure the build
./configure --host=i386-unknown-linux --prefix="$HOME/opt"
- Compile the code
make
- Installed the newly compiled Ruby 0.95
make install
- Enjoy your ancient Ruby
echo 'print "Hello from Ruby 0.95\n"' | $HOME/opt/bin/ruby
There's rudimentary Docker support.
docker build --tag=ruby95 .
# Run a Ruby 0.95 program from STDIN
echo "print 'Hello world\n'" | docker run --interactive ruby95
# Run one of the samples included in the Docker image
docker run ruby95 sample/dir.rb
- It segfaults if you look at it wrong
- Many things that you might be used to don't exist (e.g.
puts
or anything HTTP related) - None of the extensions from
ext/
are included because I could get the setup script to stop segfaulting
- Segfaults: pull requests or tips about fixing the segfaults would be highly appreciated
- Autoconf: updating the autoconf setup would probably make it a fair bit easier to try out Ruby 0.95. Again, pull requests would be welcomed…