Ruby 0.95

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?

• 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.

Compiling

This has only been tested with Ubuntu 16.04 (with GCC 5.4), but other distros would probably work too.

1. Install the build dependencies

sudo apt install autoconf bison build-essential flex git

2. Clone this repo

git clone https://github.com/matiaskorhonen/ruby-0.95.git
cd ruby-0.95

3. 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

4. Configure the build

./configure --host=i386-unknown-linux --prefix="$HOME/opt"

5. Compile the code

make

6. Installed the newly compiled Ruby 0.95

make install

7. Enjoy your ancient Ruby

echo 'print "Hello from Ruby 0.95\n"' | $HOME/opt/bin/ruby

Docker support

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

Caveats

• 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

Help wanted

• 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…