Ruby v0.49
Ruby 0.49 is the oldest extant version of Ruby. While it's fascinating to see where Ruby came from, actually running Ruby 0.49 is difficult nowadays: It was written exclusively for 32 bit computers, was compiled in an (even for the time) old version of C, and has multiple bugs that can lead to segmentation faults.
Until now.
After spending copious amounts of time fiddling with it, you can now install, compile, and play with Ruby 0.49 locally on your computer!
Notes
The original code as it existed in 1994 is in original. The code I've cleaned up lives in fixed. I've tried to stay as true to the original code as possible in my cleaned up code, only fixing things that're necessary.
You can identify all the changes I've made in fixed via __r49; If it doesn't have __r49, I didn't touch it (and that's how the code originally looked.)
Compiling
- Clone this repo
cdintofixed- Run
./configure. - Run
make. The resulting./rubyexecutable is ruby 0.49!
Flags
The following flags affect how the program compiles. You can disable them by adding -D<__r49_no_<flag> to CPPFLAGS when you call make. (e.g., CPPFLAGS='-D__r49_no_64bit -D__r49_no_bugfix make.)
| name | description |
|---|---|
__r49_required_change |
Changes that are required to compile it with modern compilers |
__r49_64bit |
Changes to allow compiling on 64 bit |
__r49_critical_bugfix |
Fixes to the sourcecode that make Ruby 0.49 bearable |
__r49_bugfix |
More minor bugfixes to the source code |
__r49_recursion_limit |
How many stackframes to use; set to 0 to revert to the original behaviour of segfaulting when you stack overflow |
__r49_no_use_includes |
Use #includes for stdlib prototypes, instead of explicitly declaring them. |
Caveats
If you disable some of the macros, you may end up with segfaults. I also haven't exhaustively tested it, so you may encounter problems.
Reading CHANGELOG and friends
It's in EUC-JP encoding. You can convert via iconv -f EUC-JP -t UTF-8 input_filename; I then pasted it into Google translate to read it.