Natalie is a work-in-progress Ruby implementation.
It provides an ahead-of-time compiler using C++ and gcc/clang as the backend. Also, the language has a REPL that performs incremental compilation.
There is much work left to do before this is useful. Please let me know if you want to help!
Contributions are welcome! You can learn more about how I work on Natalie via the hacking session videos on YouTube.
The easiest way to get started right now would be to find a method on an object that is not yet implemented and make it yourself! Also take a look at good first issues. (See the 'Building' and 'Running Tests' sections below for some helpful steps.)
We have a very quiet Discord server -- come and hang out!
Natalie is tested on macOS and Ubuntu Linux. Windows is not yet supported.
Natalie requires a system Ruby (MRI) to host the compiler, for now.
Prerequisites:
- git
- autoconf
- automake
- libtool
- GNU make
- gcc or clang
- Ruby 3.1 or higher with dev headers
- Using rbenv to install Ruby is preferred.
- Installing rbenv-aliases along with rbenv helps with matching Ruby versions like
3.1
to the latest patch release. - If not using rbenv or another version manager, you'll need the
ruby
andruby-dev
package from your system.
- ccache (optional, but recommended)
- compiledb (optional, but recommended)
Install the above prerequisites on your platform, then run:
git clone https://github.com/natalie-lang/natalie
cd natalie
rake
- Don't use
sudo
! If you already made that mistake, then you shouldsudo rm -rf build
and try again. - If you get an error about file permissions, e.g. unable to write a file to somewhere like
/usr/lib/ruby
, or another path that would require root, then you have a couple options:- Use a tool like rbenv to install a Ruby version in your
home directory. Gems will also be installed there. Run
rbenv version
to see which version is currently selected. Runrbenv shell
followed by a version to select that version. - Specify where to install gems with something like:
You'll just have to remember to do that every time you open a new terminal tab.
mkdir -p ~/gems export GEM_HOME=~/gems
- Use a tool like rbenv to install a Ruby version in your
home directory. Gems will also be installed there. Run
- If you get an error about missing
bundler
, then your operating system probably didn't install it alongside Ruby. You can rungem install bundler
to get it.
NOTE: Currently, the default build is the "debug" build, since Nataile is in active development.
But you can build in release mode with rake build_release
.
REPL:
bin/natalie
Run a Ruby script:
bin/natalie examples/hello.rb
Compile a file to an executable:
bin/natalie -c hello examples/hello.rb
./hello
docker build -t natalie . # build image
docker run -it --rm natalie # repl
docker run -it --rm natalie -e "p 2 * 3" # immediate
docker run -it --rm -v$(pwd)/myfile.rb:/myfile.rb natalie /myfile.rb # execute a local rb file
docker run -it --rm --entrypoint bash natalie # bash prompt
To run a test (or spec), you can run it like a normal Ruby script:
bin/natalie spec/core/string/strip_spec.rb
This will run the tests and tell you if there are any failures.
If you want to run all the tests that we expect to pass, you can run:
rake test
Lastly, if you need to run a handful of tests locally, you can use the
test/runner.rb
helper script:
bin/natalie test/runner.rb test/natalie/if_test.rb test/natalie/loop_test.rb
The files in spec/
come from the excellent ruby/spec
project, which is a community-curated repo of test files that any Ruby
implementation can use to compare its conformance to what MRI (Matz's Ruby
Interpreter) does. We copy specs over as we implement the part of the language
that they cover.
Everything in test/
is stuff we wrote while working on Natalie. These are
tests that helped us bootstrap certain parts of the language and/or weren't
covered as much as we would like by the official Ruby specs. We use this
to supplement the specs in spec/
.
Natalie is copyright 2023, Tim Morgan and contributors. Natalie is licensed
under the MIT License; see the LICENSE
file in this directory for the full text.
Some parts of this program are copied from other sources, and the copyright
belongs to the respective owner. Such copyright notices are either at the top of
the respective file, in the same directory with a name like LICENSE
, or both.
file(s) | copyright | license |
---|---|---|
bigint.* |
983 | Unlicense |
cgi.rb |
Wakou Aoyama | BSD |
cgi/* |
Wakou Aoyama | BSD |
delegate.rb |
Yukihiro Matsumoto | BSD |
dtoa.c |
David M. Gay, Lucent Technologies | custom permissive |
erb/util.rb |
Masatoshi SEKI | BSD |
ipaddr.rb |
Hajimu Umemoto and Akinori Musha | BSD |
find.rb |
Kazuki Tsujimoto | BSD |
linenoise |
S. Sanfilippo and P. Noordhuis | BSD |
minicoro.h |
Eduardo Bart | MIT |
pp.rb |
Yukihiro Matsumoto | BSD |
prettyprint.rb |
Yukihiro Matsumoto | BSD |
shellwords.rb |
Akinori MUSHA | BSD |
spec/* |
Engine Yard, Inc. | MIT |
uri.rb |
Akira Yamada | BSD |
uri/* |
Akira Yamada | BSD |
version.rb |
Engine Yard, Inc. | MIT |
zlib |
Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler | zlib license |
See each file above for full copyright and license text.