1. What is Rubinius

Rubinius is an implementation of the Ruby programming language. Rubinius
includes a bytecode virtual machine, parser, bytecode compiler, garbage
collector, JIT native machine code compiler, and Ruby core and standard
libraries.

Rubinius currently is compatible with Ruby version 1.8.7. Support for Ruby
version 1.9.2 is coming soon.


2. License

Rubinius uses the BSD license. See LICENSE for details.


3. Installing Rubinius

Rubinius runs on Mac OS X and many Unix/Linux operating systems. Support for
Microsoft Windows is coming soon.

For more information about building and running Rubinius, run 'rake docs'.

To install Rubinius, use the following steps:

  1. Ensure you have MRI 1.8.7+, rubygems, rake, and git installed
  2. git clone git://github.com/evanphx/rubinius.git
  3. cd rubinius
  4. ./configure --prefix=/path/to/install/dir
  5. rake install

When the install process finishes, follow the directions to add the Rubinius
executable (bin) directory to your PATH.

Rubinius comes with RubyGems built-in. To install a gem, run the following:

  rbx gem install <gem_name>

After installing Rubinius, you can access the built-in documentation at any
time by running 'rbx docs'.

3.1 Rubinius with RVM

You may wish to use the Ruby enVironment Manager (RVM) project to install
Rubinius. For the most current documentation for RVM, please visit
http://rvm.beginrescueend.com.

Be sure that RVM has been installed properly and is loaded as a function as is
explained in detail on the basics page, http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/rvm/basics/

Assuming all Rubinius dependencies have been preinstalled on the system, you may
now install Rubinius either latest or head as follows,

  rvm install rbx         # Installs latest release (defaulted to install head)
  rvm install rbx-head    # Installs Rubinius master branch from github

Once installed,

  rvm use rbx  # Selects Rubinius into the current shell session.

If you wish to make Rubinius the default interpreter when you open new shells,

  rvm use rbx --default

In order to view the dependency list to preinstall for rbx type

  rvm notes

For more information on working with rvm please visit the RVM website,

  http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/

4. Version 1.1

Rubinius has been under development as a public open-source project since
November 2006. Rubinius development is sponsored by Engine Yard, Inc. and
assisted by the generous work of over 100 contributors.

At version 1.1, Rubinius is significantly feature-complete. It is expected
that your Ruby code will run correctly. Additionally, many MRI C extensions
are expected to work, as long as they do not depend on MRI-specific object
internals or the MRI interpreter internals.

With the JIT, Rubinius performance is quite good, sometimes faster than MRI
and sometimes slower. Rubinius generally executes Ruby code very fast as
compared to MRI. However, since the majority of the Ruby core library is also
implemented in Ruby rather than C as it is in MRI, code that depends heavily
on Array, Hash, String, etc. may run slower in Rubinius right now. As the JIT
improves, overall performance of your code under Rubinius will improve.


5. Goals

* Thread safety. Rubinius intends to be thread-safe so you could embed more
  than one interpreter in a single application.

* Clean, readable code that is easy for users to understand and extend.

* Reliable, rock-solid code. Valgrind is used to help verify correctness.

* Bring modern research in virtual machines, garbage collectors, and compilers
  to the Ruby programming language.


6. Tickets

Please file tickets for bugs or problems that you encounter. The issue tracker
is: http://github.com/evanphx/rubinius/issues. Run 'rake docs' for more
details.


7. Contributing

The Rubinius team welcomes contributions. Run 'rake docs' and see the
"Contributing" page.