- 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.
by Broussebar
1 subcomments
- 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
- IIRC MRuby is also used as the implementation for the DragonRuby game engine[0]
[0] https://dragonruby.org/
- Also worth a mention: mruby/c (https://github.com/mrubyc/mrubyc), which is an even smaller ruby for single-chip microprocessors
- Previous discussions:
April 2012 (55 comments, 174 points): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3866555
- Noteworthy in the MRuby universe, which is all about lightweight Ruby implementations is picoruby. You can get an integrated ruby shell on a Raspberry Pi Pico:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiJC_v5Lus8
https://picoruby.org/
- The one thing I like the most about mruby is the way you can ship apps.
When you normally want to ship apps which are written in Java, C#, python etc. you have to tell your users they have to download that runtime and your deps and how to start the runtime and which args to start your app from the command line.
With mruby you can just ship one file and everything is self contained.
- also possibly interesting to some is the cosmopolitan libc inclusion:
https://github.com/mruby/mruby/pull/6681
- I believe even in Japan Lua is more popular because of the reasons mentioned in other threads. When I worked at a game studio there Lua was the script engine of the choice, mostly because other companies are also using it and there was a tribal knowledge of the language.
Mruby was a good attempt but I don't think they have become a competitive options.
- I love Ruby and have tried to use mruby several times, but the one thing that always becomes an issue is that it uses Ruby’s own native-extension build system for compilation, which is configured in Ruby itself. It makes it a total pain to include in other build systems, or when compiling to other targets (i.e. WASM)
Frankly, I love Ruby as a language, but if it were as easy to embed as Lua I would have no reason to use Lua.
- Let's call it Murby :)
by sethammons
0 subcomment
- /me tips fedora: "m'ruby"
I'm sorry, first thing that came to mind.
- [flagged]
- Looking for a good tutorial about Visual Basic for Real time rocket guidance, any repo you can recommend?
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