According to Matsumoto, Ruby was conceived in 1993. In a 1999 post to the Ruby-Talk mailing list, he shared some of his early ideas about the language:[11]
I was talking with my colleague about the possibility of an object-oriented scripting language. I knew Perl (Perl4, not Perl5), but I didn't like it really, because it had the smell of atoy language (it still has). The object-oriented language seemed very promising. I knewPython then. But I didn't like it, because I didn't think it was a true object-oriented language – OO features appeared to be add-on to the language. As a language maniac and OO fan for 15 years, I really wanted a genuine object-oriented, easy-to-use scripting language. I looked for but couldn't find one. So I decided to make it.
Matsumoto described Ruby's design as resembling a simpleLisp language at its core, with an object system like that of Smalltalk, blocks inspired byhigher-order functions, and practical utility like that of Perl.[12]
The name "Ruby" originated during an online chat session between Matsumoto and Keiju Ishitsuka on 24 February 1993, before any code had been written.[13] Two names were initially proposed: "Coral" and "Ruby". Matsumoto chose the latter in a subsequent email to Ishitsuka.[14] He also noted that one factor influencing the choice of the name was that a colleague'sbirthstone wasruby.[15][16]
The first public release of Ruby 0.95 was announced on Japanese domesticnewsgroups on 21 December 1995.[17][18] Subsequently, three more versions of Ruby were released in two days.[13] The release coincided with the launch of theJapanese-languageruby-list mailing list, which was the first mailing list for the new language.
After the release of Ruby 0.95 in 1995, several stable versions of Ruby were released in these years.[13]
In 1997, the first article about Ruby was published on the Web. In the same year, Matsumoto was hired bynetlab.jp to work on Ruby as a full-time developer.[13]
In 1998, the Ruby Application Archive was launched by Matsumoto, along with a simple English-language homepage for Ruby.[13]
In 1999, the first English language mailing listruby-talk began, which signaled a growing interest in the language outside Japan.[20] In this same year, Matsumoto and Keiju Ishitsuka wrote the first book on Ruby,The Object-oriented Scripting Language Ruby (オブジェクト指向スクリプト言語 Ruby), which was published in Japan in October 1999. It would be followed in the early 2000s by around 20 books on Ruby published in Japanese.[13]
By 2000, Ruby was more popular than Python in Japan.[21] In September 2000, the first English language bookProgramming Ruby was printed, which was later freely released to the public, further widening the adoption of Ruby amongst English speakers. In early 2002, the English-languageruby-talk mailing list was receiving more messages than the Japanese-languageruby-list, demonstrating Ruby's increasing popularity in the non-Japanese speaking world.
Ruby 1.8 was initially released August 2003, was stable for a long time, and was retired June 2013.[22] Although deprecated, there is still code based on it. Ruby 1.8 is only partially compatible with Ruby 1.9.[citation needed]
Ruby 1.8 has been the subject of several industry standards. The language specifications for Ruby were developed by the Open Standards Promotion Center of the Information-Technology Promotion Agency (aJapanese government agency) for submission to theJapanese Industrial Standards Committee (JISC) and then to theInternational Organization for Standardization (ISO). It was accepted as a Japanese Industrial Standard (JIS X 3017) in 2011[23] and an international standard (ISO/IEC 30170) in 2012.[24][25]
Around 2005, interest in the Ruby language surged in tandem withRuby on Rails, aweb framework written in Ruby. Rails is frequently credited with increasing awareness of Ruby.[26]
Effective with Ruby 1.9.3, released 31 October 2011,[27] Ruby switched from being dual-licensed under the Ruby License and the GPL to being dual-licensed under the Ruby License and the two-clause BSD license.[28] Adoption of 1.9 was slowed by changes from 1.8 that required many popular third partygems to be rewritten.[citation needed]
Ruby 2.0 was intended to be fully backward compatible with Ruby 1.9.3. As of the official 2.0.0 release on 24 February 2013, there were only five known incompatibilities.[29]
Starting with 2.1.0, Ruby's versioning policy changed to be more similar tosemantic versioning, although it differs slightly in that minor version increments may be API incompatible.[30]
Ruby 2.2.0 includes speed-ups, bugfixes, and library updates and removes some deprecated APIs. Most notably, Ruby 2.2.0 introduces changes to memory handling – an incremental garbage collector, support for garbage collection of symbols and the option to compile directly against jemalloc. It also contains experimental support for usingvfork(2) with system() and spawn(), and added support for theUnicode 7.0 specification. Since version 2.2.1,[31]Ruby MRI performance onPowerPC64 was improved.[32][33][34] Features that were made obsolete or removed include callcc, the DL library, Digest::HMAC, lib/rational.rb, lib/complex.rb, GServer, Logger::Application as well as various C API functions.[35]
Ruby 2.3.0 includes many performance improvements, updates, and bugfixes including changes to Proc#call, Socket and IO use of exception keywords, Thread#name handling, default passive Net::FTP connections, and Rake being removed from stdlib.[36] Other notable changes include:
The ability to mark allstring literals as frozen by default with a consequently large performance increase in string operations.[37]
Hash comparison to allow direct checking of key/value pairs instead of just keys.
A newsafe navigation operator&. that can ease nil handling (e.g. instead ofifobj&&obj.foo&&obj.foo.bar, we can useif obj&.foo&.bar).
Thedid_you_mean gem is now bundled by default and required on startup to automatically suggest similar name matches on aNameError orNoMethodError.
Hash#dig andArray#dig to easily extract deeply nested values (e.g. givenprofile={social:{wikipedia:{name:'Foo Baz'}}}, the valueFoo Baz can now be retrieved byprofile.dig(:social, :wikipedia, :name)).
.grep_v(regexp) which will match all negative examples of a given regular expression in addition to other new features.
Ruby 2.4.0 includes performance improvements to hash table, Array#max, Array#min, and instance variable access.[38] Other notable changes include:
Binding#irb: Start a REPL session similar to binding.pry
UnifyFixnum andBignum intoInteger class
String supports Unicode case mappings, not just ASCII
A new method, Regexp#match?, which is a faster Boolean version of Regexp#match
Thread deadlock detection now shows threads with their backtrace and dependency
A few notable changes in Ruby 2.5.0 includerescue andensure statements automatically use a surroundingdo-end block (less need for extrabegin-end blocks), method-chaining withyield_self, support for branch coverage and method coverage measurement, and easier Hash transformations withHash#slice andHash#transform_keys On top of that come a lot of performance improvements like faster block passing (3 times faster), faster Mutexes, faster ERB templates and improvements on some concatenation methods.
A few notable changes in Ruby 2.6.0 include an experimentaljust-in-time compiler (JIT), andRubyVM::AbstractSyntaxTree (experimental).
A few notable changes in Ruby 2.7.0 include pattern Matching (experimental), REPL improvements, a compaction GC, and separation of positional and keyword arguments.
Ruby 3.0.0 was released onChristmas Day in 2020.[39] It is known as Ruby 3x3, which signifies that programs would run three times faster in Ruby 3.0 comparing to Ruby 2.0.[40] and some had already been implemented in intermediate releases on the road from 2 to 3. To achieve 3x3, Ruby 3 comes with MJIT, and later YJIT, Just-In-Time Compilers, to make programs faster, although they are described as experimental and remain disabled by default (enabled by flags at runtime).
Another goal of Ruby 3.0 is to improveconcurrency and two more utilities Fibre Scheduler, and experimental Ractor facilitate the goal.[39] Ractor is light-weight and thread-safe as it is achieved by exchanging messages rather than shared objects.
Ruby 3.0 introduces RBS language to describe the types of Ruby programs forstatic analysis.[39] It is separated from general Ruby programs.
There are some syntax enhancements and library changes in Ruby 3.0 as well.[39]
Ruby 3.1 was released on 25 December 2021.[41] It includes YJIT, a new, experimental, Just-In-Time Compiler developed byShopify, to enhance the performance of real world business applications. A newdebugger is also included. There are some syntax enhancements and other improvements in this release. Network libraries forFTP,SMTP,IMAP, andPOP are moved from default gems to bundled gems.[42]
Ruby 3.2 was released on 25 December 2022.[43] It brings support for being run inside of aWebAssembly environment via a WASI interface.Regular expressions also receives some improvements, including a faster,memoized matching algorithm to protect against certainReDoS attacks, and configurable timeouts for regular expression matching. Additional debugging and syntax features are also included in this release, which include syntax suggestion, as well as error highlighting. The MJIT compiler has been re-implemented as a standard library module, while the YJIT, aRust-basedJIT compiler now supports more architectures on Linux.
Ruby 3.3 was released on 25 December 2023.[1] Ruby 3.3 introduces significant enhancements and performance improvements to the language. Key features include the introduction of the Prism parser for portable and maintainable parsing, the addition of the pure-Ruby JIT compiler RJIT, and major performance boosts in the YJIT compiler. Additionally, improvements in memory usage, the introduction of an M:N thread scheduler, and updates to the standard library contribute to a more efficient and developer-friendly Ruby ecosystem.
Ruby 3.4 was released on 25 December 2024.[44] Ruby 3.4 addsit block parameter reference, changes Prism as default parser, addsHappy Eyeballs Version 2 support to socket library, improves YJIT, adds modular Garbage Collector and so on.[45]
Matsumoto stated that Ruby is designed for programmer productivity and fun, following the principles of gooduser interface design.[46] At a Google Tech Talk in 2008 he said, "I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language."[47] He stresses that systems design needs to emphasize human, rather than computer, needs:[48]
Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think, "By doing this, the machine will run fast. By doing this, the machine will run more effectively. By doing this, the machine will something something something." They are focusing on machines. But in fact we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters. They are the slaves.
Matsumoto has said his primary design goal was to make a language that he himself enjoyed using, by minimizing programmer work and possible confusion. He has said that he had not applied theprinciple of least astonishment (POLA) to the design of Ruby;[48] in a May 2005 discussion on the newsgroup comp.lang.ruby, Matsumoto attempted to distance Ruby from POLA, explaining that because any design choice will be surprising to someone, he uses a personal standard in evaluating surprise. If that personal standard remains consistent, there would be few surprises for those familiar with the standard.[49]
Matsumoto defined it this way in an interview:[48]
Everyone has an individual background. Someone may come from Python, someone else may come from Perl, and they may be surprised by different aspects of the language. Then they come up to me and say, 'I was surprised by this feature of the language, so Ruby violates the principle of least surprise.' Wait. Wait. The principle of least surprise is not for you only. The principle of least surprise means principle of leastmy surprise. And it means the principle of least surprise after you learn Ruby very well. For example, I was a C++ programmer before I started designing Ruby. I programmed in C++ exclusively for two or three years. And after two years of C++ programming, it still surprises me.
Ruby isobject-oriented: every value is an object, including classes and instances of types that many other languages designate as primitives (such asintegers, Booleans, and "null"). Because everything in Ruby is an object, everything in Ruby has certain built-in abilities called methods. Everyfunction is amethod and methods are always called on an object. Methods defined at the top level scope become methods of the Object class. Since this class is an ancestor of every other class, such methods can be called on any object. They are also visible in all scopes, effectively serving as "global" procedures. Ruby supportsinheritance withdynamic dispatch,mixins and singleton methods (belonging to, and defined for, a singleinstance rather than being defined on the class). Though Ruby does not supportmultiple inheritance, classes can importmodules as mixins.
According to the Ruby FAQ, the syntax is similar toPerl's and the semantics are similar toSmalltalk's, but the design philosophy differs greatly fromPython's.[50]
The syntax of Ruby is broadly similar to that ofPerl andPython. Class and method definitions are signaled by keywords, whereas code blocks can be defined by either keywords or braces. In contrast to Perl, variables are not obligatorily prefixed with asigil. When used, the sigil changes the semantics of scope of the variable. For practical purposes there is no distinction betweenexpressions andstatements.[58][59] Line breaks are significant and taken as the end of a statement; a semicolon may be equivalently used. Unlike Python, indentation is not significant.
One of the differences from Python and Perl is that Ruby keeps all of its instance variables completely private to the class and only exposes them through accessor methods (attr_writer,attr_reader, etc.). Unlike the "getter" and "setter" methods of other languages likeC++ orJava, accessor methods in Ruby can be created with a single line of code viametaprogramming; however, accessor methods can also be created in the traditional fashion of C++ and Java. As invocation of these methods does not require the use of parentheses, it is trivial to change an instance variable into a full function, without modifying a single line of calling code or having to do any refactoring achieving similar functionality toC# andVB.NET property members.
Python's property descriptors are similar, but come with a trade-off in the development process. If one begins in Python by using a publicly exposed instance variable, and later changes the implementation to use a private instance variable exposed through a property descriptor, code internal to the class may need to be adjusted to use the private variable rather than the public property. Ruby's design forces all instance variables to be private, but also provides a simple way to declareset andget methods. This is in keeping with the idea that in Ruby, one never directly accesses the internal members of a class from outside the class; rather, one passes a message to the class and receives a response.
Starting with Ruby 1.9, and continuing with Ruby 2.x and above, the official Ruby interpreter has beenYARV ("Yet Another Ruby VM"), and this implementation has superseded the slower virtual machine used in previous releases of MRI.
JRuby, a mixedJava and Ruby implementation that runs on theJava virtual machine. JRuby currently targets Ruby 3.1.x.
TruffleRuby, a Java implementation using the Truffle language implementation framework withGraalVM
Rubinius, aC++ bytecode virtual machine that usesLLVM to compile to machine code at runtime. The bytecode compiler and most core classes are written in pure Ruby. Rubinius currently[when?] targets Ruby 2.3.1.
julializer, atranspiler (partial) from Ruby toJulia. It can be used for a large speedup over e.g. Ruby or JRuby implementations (may only be useful for numerical code).[60]
The maturity of Ruby implementations tends to be measured by their ability to run theRuby on Rails (Rails) framework, because it is complex to implement and uses many Ruby-specific features. The point when a particular implementation achieves this goal is called "the Rails singularity". The reference implementation, JRuby, and Rubinius[61] are all able to run Rails unmodified in a production environment.
Matsumoto originally developed Ruby on the4.3BSD-basedSony NEWS-OS 3.x, but later migrated his work toSunOS 4.x, and finally toLinux.[62][63] By 1999, Ruby was known to work across many differentoperating systems. Modern Ruby versions and implementations are available on all major desktop, mobile and server-based operating systems. Ruby is also supported across a number of cloud hosting platforms likeJelastic,Heroku,Google Cloud Platform and others.
Tools such asRVM and RBEnv, facilitate installation and partitioning of multiple ruby versions, and multiple 'gemsets' on one machine.
RubyGems is Ruby's package manager. A Ruby package is called a "gem" and can be installed via the command line. Most gems are libraries, though a few exist that are applications, such asIDEs.[64] There are over 100,000 Ruby gems hosted onRubyGems.org.[65]
Many new and existing Ruby libraries are hosted onGitHub, a service that offersversion control repository hosting forGit.
The Ruby Application Archive, which hosted applications, documentation, and libraries for Ruby programming, was maintained until 2013, when its function was transferred to RubyGems.[66]
^abcCooper, Peter (2009).Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional. Beginning from Novice to Professional (2nd ed.). Berkeley: APress. p. 101.ISBN978-1-4302-2363-4.To a lesser extent, Python, LISP, Eiffel, Ada, and C++ have also influenced Ruby.
^Burks, Tim."About Nu™".Programming Nu™. Neon Design Technology, Inc.Archived from the original on 2018-12-25. Retrieved2011-07-21.
^Ring Team (3 December 2017)."Ring and other languages".ring-lang.net. ring-lang.Archived from the original on 25 December 2018. Retrieved3 December 2017.
^Lattner, Chris (2014-06-03)."Chris Lattner's Homepage". Chris Lattner.Archived from the original on 2018-12-25. Retrieved2014-06-03.The Swift language is the product of tireless effort from a team of language experts, documentation gurus, compiler optimization ninjas, and an incredibly important internal dogfooding group who provided feedback to help refine and battle-test ideas. Of course, it also greatly benefited from the experiences hard-won by many other languages in the field, drawing ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list.
^"About Ruby".Archived from the original on 9 October 2014. Retrieved15 February 2020.
^"v1_9_3_0/NEWS".RubySubversion source repository. ruby-lang.org. September 17, 2011. Archived fromthe original on November 6, 2015. RetrievedFebruary 20, 2013.
^Gustavo Frederico Temple Pedrosa, Vitor de Lima, Leonardo Bianconi (2015)."Ruby 2.2.1 Released".Archived from the original on 16 May 2016. Retrieved12 July 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^Gustavo Frederico Temple Pedrosa, Vitor de Lima, Leonardo Bianconi (2015)."v2.2.1 ChangeLog". Archived fromthe original on 26 February 2017. Retrieved12 July 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^"[ruby-talk:01120] Re: The value of while..." Archived fromthe original on 2011-07-17. Retrieved2008-12-06.In Ruby's syntax, statement is just a special case of an expression that cannot appear as an argument (e.g. multiple assignment).
