jcs / natalie

a unique Ruby implementation, transpiled to C++ (WIP)

Natalie

Natalie is a very early-stage work-in-progress Ruby implementation.

It provides an ahead-of-time compiler using C++ and gcc/clang as the backend. Also, the language has a REPL that performs incremental compilation.

There is much work left to do before this is useful. Please let me know if you want to help!

Helping Out

Contributions are welcome! You can learn more about how I work on Natalie via the hacking session videos on YouTube.

The easiest way to get started right now would be to find a method on an object that is not yet implemented and make it yourself!

Building

Natalie is tested on macOS, OpenBSD, and Ubuntu Linux. Windows is not yet supported.

The compiler and REPL require MRI Ruby. I only test with Ruby 2.7.x currently.

Prerequisites:

• git
• autoconf
• automake
• libtool
• cmake
• GNU make
• Ruby 2.7.x

Install the above prerequisites on your platform, then run:

git clone https://github.com/seven1m/natalie
git submodule update --init
gem install bundler
bundle install
make # or gmake if your system make isn't GNU make

NOTE: Currently, the default build is the "debug" build.

Usage

REPL:

bin/natalie

Run a Ruby script:

bin/natalie examples/hello.rb

Compile a file to an executable:

bin/natalie examples/hello.rb -c hello
./hello

Using With Docker

docker build -t natalie .                                            # build image
docker run -it --rm natalie                                          # repl
docker run -it --rm natalie -e "p 2 * 3"                             # immediate
docker run -it --rm -v$(pwd)/myfile.rb:/myfile.rb natalie /myfile.rb # execute a local nat file
docker run -it --rm --entrypoint bash natalie                        # bash prompt