Mruby isn’t aimed at embedded systems, it’s “lightweight Ruby” intended to be embedded within a lower-level application. The language it’s most similar to is Lua.
My gut feeling comparing the two is that mRuby is a better (or at least less “quirky”) language, but Lua has a better (more robust) implementation. I don’t know how the two compare in terms of performance or “lightweight-ness”.
Lua definitely seems to be more widely-used, at least outside Japan.
Agreed. Lua is older though. It was created in 1993.
mruby was created in 2012.
I have only two gripes with regard to mruby.
1) The primary users are C hackers. That's ok, but it means it also leaves out many other people. (Lua has the same problem of course.)
2) Documentation. This is something that really plagues about 90% of ruby projects. And it's not getting any better. It is as if in ruby, only 10% care about documentation - at best. Look at rack, opal, wasm for ruby - the documentation is TOTAL TRASH. Non-existing; look at rack. What a joke.
Now that ruby is following perl in its extinction path (sorry, the numbers are hard and real, there is no way to deny it), the ruby community should instead try to reverse that trend. Instead you see mega-corporations such as shopify pwning the remaining ecosystem and cannibalizing on it or people such as DHH rant about how Europe is collapsing (what the actual ... https://world.hey.com/dhh/europe-is-weak-and-delusional-but-... - we need an alternative to rails, how can anyone still work with DHH? Lo and behold, another shopify guy. The message is so clear for everyone to see now). None of this will of course revitalize ruby. Without an active AND actively growing community, ruby is set to die. I say this as someone who still uses ruby daily; I am tired of the "rumours of ruby dying are exaggerated". Yes, the rumours are exaggerated - but they are not rumours. The numbers are solid. TIOBE alone, with its 10000 faults, shows this trend clearly.
I'd like mruby as some kind of fail-save boot system. Ruby powering
the operating system as much as possible (ultimately ruby is just
syntactic sugar over C, though, so I am fine using C of course).
The lack of documentation means that I'd just waste my time though.
Not going to do that.
Also, I think mruby and MRI should not be separate. It doesn't do
the project any good. It should be as modular as possible but one
code base only.
I think the name mruby kind of makes sense; we have
MRI (matz ruby implementation) so the leading "M"
there; we have jruby too. We also have truffleruby
which is a bit against that name scheme ... but we could
call it truby. Nobody does that, but we could. And
MRI could also be called c-ruby. These are not
great names though. Murby is also not a great name;
it reminds me of Murphy from Robocop though.
Mruby isn’t aimed at embedded systems, it’s “lightweight Ruby” intended to be embedded within a lower-level application. The language it’s most similar to is Lua.
My gut feeling comparing the two is that mRuby is a better (or at least less “quirky”) language, but Lua has a better (more robust) implementation. I don’t know how the two compare in terms of performance or “lightweight-ness”.
Lua definitely seems to be more widely-used, at least outside Japan.
There's no need to compare to Lua directly, there many similar languages. Notably TCL, or more recently Rhai for Rust.
Agreed. Lua is older though. It was created in 1993.
mruby was created in 2012.
I have only two gripes with regard to mruby.
1) The primary users are C hackers. That's ok, but it means it also leaves out many other people. (Lua has the same problem of course.)
2) Documentation. This is something that really plagues about 90% of ruby projects. And it's not getting any better. It is as if in ruby, only 10% care about documentation - at best. Look at rack, opal, wasm for ruby - the documentation is TOTAL TRASH. Non-existing; look at rack. What a joke.
Now that ruby is following perl in its extinction path (sorry, the numbers are hard and real, there is no way to deny it), the ruby community should instead try to reverse that trend. Instead you see mega-corporations such as shopify pwning the remaining ecosystem and cannibalizing on it or people such as DHH rant about how Europe is collapsing (what the actual ... https://world.hey.com/dhh/europe-is-weak-and-delusional-but-... - we need an alternative to rails, how can anyone still work with DHH? Lo and behold, another shopify guy. The message is so clear for everyone to see now). None of this will of course revitalize ruby. Without an active AND actively growing community, ruby is set to die. I say this as someone who still uses ruby daily; I am tired of the "rumours of ruby dying are exaggerated". Yes, the rumours are exaggerated - but they are not rumours. The numbers are solid. TIOBE alone, with its 10000 faults, shows this trend clearly.
Also worth a mention: mruby/c (https://github.com/mrubyc/mrubyc), which is an even smaller ruby for single-chip microprocessors
/me tips fedora: "m'ruby"
I'm sorry, first thing that came to mind.
The best use case for Mruby I saw is this talk: "Developing your Dreamcast games with mruby"[0] by Yuji Yokoo
[0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ni-1x5Esa_o
I'd like mruby as some kind of fail-save boot system. Ruby powering the operating system as much as possible (ultimately ruby is just syntactic sugar over C, though, so I am fine using C of course).
The lack of documentation means that I'd just waste my time though. Not going to do that.
Also, I think mruby and MRI should not be separate. It doesn't do the project any good. It should be as modular as possible but one code base only.
also possibly interesting to some is the cosmopolitan libc inclusion:
https://github.com/mruby/mruby/pull/6681
Let's call it Murby :)
I think the name mruby kind of makes sense; we have MRI (matz ruby implementation) so the leading "M" there; we have jruby too. We also have truffleruby which is a bit against that name scheme ... but we could call it truby. Nobody does that, but we could. And MRI could also be called c-ruby. These are not great names though. Murby is also not a great name; it reminds me of Murphy from Robocop though.