Compile Ruby with its C API

Question

If I take a ruby code

puts "Hello World!"

and rewrite it using the C API of Ruby

#include "ruby.h"

int main() {
  ruby_init();

  rb_funcall(Qnil, rb_intern("puts"), 1, rb_str_new2("Hello World!"));

  ruby_finalize();
  return 0;
}

and compile it, is this a way to compile Ruby code?

If I create a program that uses Ripper to parse the Ruby code and rewrite it as C, can I call it as a "Ruby compiler"? There're some ruby code that can't be rewrited in Ruby in this way? Did someone tried to write this kind of "compiler" before?

Answer 1

A couple of good articles on this topic:

• http://whitequark.org/blog/2011/12/21/statically-compiled-ruby/
• a bit dated... http://macournoyer.com/blog/2008/12/09/orange/

Also have you heard of Crystal? While not truly Ruby, it looks interesting:

Crystal is a programming language with the following goals:

• Have the same syntax as Ruby, or at least as similar as possible.
• Never have to specify the type of a variable or method argument.
• Be able to call C code by writing bindings to it in Crystal.
• Have compile-time evaluation and generation of code, to avoid boilerplate code.
• Compile to efficient native code.

about it on SO: Anybody tried the Crystal Programming Language (machine-code compiled Ruby)?

And another (commercial) project with the same purposes but mainly targeted at embedded development: http://foundry-lang.org/