RubyGateway: Embed Ruby in Swift | Hacker News Reader

RubyGateway: Embed Ruby in Swift

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38 pointsfuturecat7 comments

This is probably not what anyone who reads this title is expecting it to be.

On the other hand, there's a project on iOS, "Rubyist", that embeds mRuby and lets you actually write, parse, and execute ruby code within your app. It even has some hooks for calling into some iOS APIs (Widget APIs, most notably). It's a fun idea, but might be a dead project. https://rubyist.app

I wish there was a canonical Xcode project getting mRuby imported into an iOS/Mac app, so anyone could use it as a starting point for their ideas. I dunno, maybe one is out there and I just haven't found it?

Are there any limitations in this?

Also, the project spelled "access" wrong here:

// Acess an attribute print("Name is \(student.get("name"))")

I don't know if it's worth making a PR for such a tiny thing.

The industry standard is to wait until Hacktoberfest to open that PR.

Does this need ruby on the host? I'm asking because it's really difficult to have a portable ruby binary, only traveling ruby comes to mind

I’ve gone down this rabbit hole, there are several options to almost achieve portability in Ruby. But making it portable and cross-platform like how Go has a single binary file has not been possible for me.

You already mentioned Traveling Ruby, but there are also:

OCRA (One-Click Ruby Application)

RubyEncoder (commercial)

DragonRuby? (It’s a game engine though)

Ruby2exe (rb2exe) but I believe it’s dead

enclose-io/ruby

Ruby-packer

portable-ruby project by homebrew

RubyMotion (costs probably)

Other ideas have been:

Using TruffleRuby (GraalVM) and compile using nativeimage

If you don’t use any gems, then maybe compile your script with opal.rb to js then bundle that js into single executable

Use your script with MRuby and enjoy the benefits of C

Run your script with JRuby and bundle the war file with warbler

Compile the Ruby script with Crystal (maybe slight modifications has to be done with your code) and use the cross compile with static flag

(Btw, running bundle install with the “—standalone” might ease with the bundling and distribution)

Quick update, I tried some of the options I provided, here's the result.

OCRA seem to have a tiny issue with some missing files (fiber.so), so there are two forks that works pretty well with Ruby scripts that is also including gems. I tried both of them on a large script and it worked pretty well. The only downside is that it only supports Windows

OCRAN (https://rubygems.org/gems/ocran) Aibika (https://rubygems.org/gems/aibika)

Ignored RubyEncoder because it's commercial

DragonRuby is a whole toolkit, so I am not sure if it offers a quick cli to bundle a ruby script with its gems.

I tried rb2exe (https://rubygems.org/gems/rb2exe) but it required exactly Ruby version 2.2.2 (docker pull txt3rob/ruby-2.2.2-docker)

ruby2exe (https://rubygems.org/gems/ruby2exe) didn't work and looks abandoned

enclose-io/ruby (https://github.com/enclose-io/ruby) doesn't offer installation through RubyGems, same with Ruby-packer (https://github.com/pmq20/ruby-packer), so not going to try it

Portable-ruby (https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-portable-ruby) is just a project where you download a folder which has portable Ruby in it, nothing else. It does not bundle your script with it

RubyMotion costs, so I ignored it

Using TruffleRuby had a bit more steps and was complex, so I skipped it

MRuby did work, but not with the gems I was using, so I had to rely on their own libraries (https://mruby.org/libraries)

Crystal did work on simpler scripts but I had to adjust the code a bit to make it valid for the Crystal compiler.

This talk might interest you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMNDw4fYu60

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