Ruby-in-Ruby Rubinius reaches 1.0

The developers of Rubinius, an version of the Ruby language mostly written in Ruby, have released stable version 1.0. Rubinius implements the Ruby language with a byte code compiler and the majority of the core classes written in pure Ruby. It adds a byte code virtual machine, written in C++, and incorporates LLVM to compile the byte code to machine code at run time.

The release, named Fabius after a "great defender of Rome", is the culmination of three and a half years of development since Evan Phoenix began the project. Phoenix was hired in 2007 by Engine Yard to work on Rubinius and the developer says the company has "tirelessly supported" the project. Phoenix also thanks the over two hundred contributors who have helped in the development.

The BSD licensed release 1.0 is, according to the developers, compatible out-of-the-box with Rails, Rake, RSpec, IRB, Nokogiri, Yaml, Mongrel, MySQL and other popular Ruby gems, plug-ins and C extensions. It currently passes 93% of the RubySpec test suite, a project which itself was a product of Rubinius development. Rubinius 1.0 is available to download from the Rubini.us web site as a source code archive or as binary installers for Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6. A Git repository is also available.

(djwm)