Table of contents
What is mruby
mruby is the lightweight implementation of the Ruby language complying to (part
of) the ISO standard with more recent features provided by Ruby 4.x.
Also, its syntax is Ruby 4.x compatible.
You can link and embed mruby within your application. The "mruby" interpreter
program and the interactive "mirb" shell are provided as examples. You can also
compile Ruby programs into compiled byte code using the "mrbc" compiler. All
these tools are located in the "bin" directory. "mrbc" can also generate
compiled byte code in a C source file. See the "mrbtest" program under the
"test" directory for an example.
This achievement was sponsored by the Regional Innovation Creation R&D Programs
of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan.
How to get mruby
To get mruby, you can download a release from the official mruby GitHub
repository or clone the trunk of the mruby source tree with the "git clone"
command. You can also install and compile mruby using ruby-install, ruby-build, rvm, conda or Homebrew.
Releases, including release candidates, are published on the releases page:
https://github.com/mruby/mruby/releases.
Download the mruby-<version>.tar.gz, .tar.xz or .zip attached to a
release. The "Source code" archives GitHub generates for a tag, and the ZIP
of the master branch, leave out the Prism parser that mruby-compiler carries
as a git submodule, so they do not build.
The trunk of the mruby source tree can be checked out with the following
command; the --recursive fetches that submodule as well:
$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/mruby/mruby.git
In a clone made without it, rake fetches the submodule on the first build.
mruby homepage
The URL of the mruby homepage is: https://mruby.org.
Mailing list
We don't have a mailing list, but you can use GitHub issues.
How to compile, test, and install (mruby and gems)
For the simplest case, type
rake all test
See the compile.md file for the detail.
Amalgamation (single-file build)
mruby supports amalgamation, which combines all source files into a single
mruby.c and mruby.h for easy embedding (similar to SQLite).
rake amalgam
Output files are generated in build/host/amalgam/. To use:
gcc -I./build/host/amalgam your_app.c ./build/host/amalgam/mruby.c -o your_app -lm
Building documentation
There are two sets of documentation in mruby: the mruby API (generated by YARD) and C API (Doxygen and Graphviz)
To build both of them, simply go
rake doc
You can also view them in your browser
rake view_api
rake view_capi
How to customize mruby (mrbgems)
mruby contains a package manager called "mrbgems" that you can use to create
extensions in C and/or Ruby. For a guide on how to use mrbgems, consult the
mrbgems.md file, and for example code, refer to the
examples/mrbgems/ folder.
Index of Document
License
mruby is released under the MIT License.
Note for License
mruby has chosen a MIT License due to its permissive license allowing
developers to target various environments such as embedded systems.
However, the license requires the display of the copyright notice and license
information in manuals for instance. Doing so for big projects can be
complicated or troublesome. This is why mruby has decided to display "mruby
developers" as the copyright name to make it simple conventionally.
In the future, mruby might ask you to distribute your new code
(that you will commit,) under the MIT License as a member of
"mruby developers" but contributors will keep their copyright.
(We did not intend for contributors to transfer or waive their copyrights,
actual copyright holder name (contributors) will be listed in the AUTHORS
file.)
Please ask us if you want to distribute your code under another license.
How to Contribute
To contribute to mruby, please refer to the contribution guidelines and send a pull request to the mruby GitHub repository.
By contributing, you grant non-exclusive rights to your code under the MIT License.
Contributors
