Interpreter is a program that reads your source code, converts it into a series of executable instructions and then run them. Its like a compiler but it runs our code directly without producing an output file.
Different production-ready Ruby interpreters -
- MRI (The original implementation & what most people use)
- Rubinius
- JRuby
There are some others like - Opal, IronRuby, MacRuby or MagLev.
MRI stands for Matz’s Ruby Interpreter, but some of the core developers prefer to call it CRuby. It was created (and is still maintained by) Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) in 1995 & it’s written entirely in C. CRuby’s “under the hood” implementation has gone through several generations of technology. “YARV” stands for “Yet Another Ruby VM.” YARV is the stack-based interpreter technology that CRuby 1.9 through 2.5 uses. It replaced the old-style “abstract syntax tree” interpreter from Ruby 1.8, long ago.
Then we have JRuby, which is written in Java & runs on the JVM (Java Virtual Machine). One thing you can do, that isn’t possible in any other Ruby interpreter, is to use Java libraries in your code.
The main goal of Rubinius is to have a Ruby interpreter written in Ruby itself (but there are still some parts written in C++).
Another important difference between MRI & other interpreters is that MRI has GIL (Global Interpreter Lock). A goal for Ruby 3.0 is to remove the GIL.
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