What is Ruby written in?
What Ruby is used for
Ruby is best known for web development through Ruby on Rails, which popularized convention-over-configuration and rapid prototyping. It is also widely used for scripting, automation, and DevOps tooling.
Notable software: GitHub, Shopify, Airbnb's early platform, and the Homebrew package manager are built with Ruby.
About Ruby
Ruby is a general-purpose programming language. It is a dynamically typed and garbage-collected language that is executed directly by an interpreter. It supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming.
Ruby first appeared in 1995 and was designed by Yukihiro Matsumoto. Ruby has a large, active user base today.
Ruby in the language family tree
Ruby drew on ideas from Smalltalk, Python, Perl, Lisp, and Eiffel and went on to influence Crystal, Elixir, CoffeeScript, Groovy, D, and Julia.
Sources: Wikipedia · Wikidata · Official site
Quick Facts
- Short answer
- CRuby/MRI is written in C
- Created by
- Yukihiro Matsumoto, 1995
- Other implementations
- JRuby (Java), TruffleRuby (GraalVM)
- Execution
- Bytecode on the YARV virtual machine
Ruby implementations
| Implementation | Written in | Role |
|---|---|---|
| CRuby / MRI | C | Reference implementation; runs YARV bytecode |
| JRuby | Java | Ruby on the JVM |
| TruffleRuby | Java | High-performance Ruby on GraalVM |
Frequently Asked Questions
Evidence Sources
- https://github.com/ruby/ruby
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)
- https://crystal-lang.org/
- https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_(programming_language)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoffeeScript
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Groovy
- https://dlang.org/overview.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_(programming_language)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_(programming_language)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_(programming_language)
- Ruby on Wikidata (Q161053)