What is mruby

mruby is the lightweight implementation of the Ruby language complying to (part of) the [ISO standard][ISO-standard] with more recent features provided by Ruby 3.x. Also, its syntax is Ruby 3.x compatible except for pattern matching.

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 the stable version 3.3.0 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 or rvm.

The latest development version of mruby can be downloaded via the following URL: https://github.com/mruby/mruby/zipball/master

The trunk of the mruby source tree can be checked out with the following command:

$ git clone https://github.com/mruby/mruby.git

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.

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.