Artichoke is a Ruby implementation written in Rust and Ruby. Artichoke intends to be MRI-compatible and targets recent MRI Ruby. Artichoke provides a Ruby runtime implemented in Rust and Ruby.

Artichoke Ruby Wasm Playground

You can try Artichoke in your browser. The Artichoke Playground runs a WebAssembly build of Artichoke.

Download a prebuilt binary from artichoke/nightly. Binaries are available for Linux, Linux/musl, macOS, and Windows.

These daily binaries track the latest trunk branch of Artichoke.

Binaries are also distributed through ruby-build. To install with rbenv:

$ rbenv install artichoke-dev

You can install a pre-release build of Artichoke using cargo, Rust's package manager, by running:

$ cargo install --git https://github.com/artichoke/artichoke --branch trunk --locked artichoke

To install via cargo install or to checkout and build locally, you'll need Rust and clang. BUILD.md has more detail on how to set up the compiler toolchain.

Artichoke is available on Docker Hub.

You can launch a REPL by running:

docker run -it docker.io/artichokeruby/artichoke airb

Artichoke ships with two binaries: airb and artichoke.

airb is the Artichoke implementation of irb and is an interactive Ruby shell and REPL.

airb is a readline-enabled shell, although it does not persist history.

artichoke is the ruby binary frontend to Artichoke.

artichoke supports executing programs via files, stdin, or inline with one or more -e flags.

Artichoke can require, require_relative, and load files from the local file system, but otherwise does not yet support local file system access. A temporary workaround is to inject data into the interpreter with the --with-fixture flag, which reads file contents into a $fixture global.

$ artichoke --help
Artichoke is a Ruby made with Rust.

Usage: artichoke [OPTIONS] [programfile] [arguments]...

Arguments:
  [programfile]
  [arguments]...

Options:
      --copyright               print the copyright
  -e <commands>                 one line of script. Several -e's allowed. Omit [programfile]
      --with-fixture <fixture>  file whose contents will be read into the `$fixture` global
  -h, --help                    Print help
  -V, --version                 Print version

Artichoke is designed to enable experimentation. The top goals of the project are:

• Support WebAssembly as a build target.
• Support embedding and executing Ruby in untrusted environments.
• Distribute Ruby applications as single-binary artifacts.
• Implement Ruby with state-of-the-art dependencies.
• Experiment with VMs to support dynamic codegen, ahead of time compilation, parallelism and eliminating the GIL, and novel memory management and garbage collection techniques.

Artichoke aspires to be an MRI Ruby-compatible implementation of the Ruby programming language. There is lots to do.

If Artichoke does not run Ruby source code in the same way that MRI does, it is a bug and we would appreciate if you filed an issue so we can fix it.

If you would like to contribute code 👩‍💻👨‍💻, find an issue that looks interesting and leave a comment that you're beginning to investigate. If there is no issue, please file one before beginning to work on a PR. Good first issues are labeled E-easy.

If you'd like to engage in a discussion outside of GitHub, you can join Artichoke's public Discord server.

artichoke is licensed with the MIT License (c) Ryan Lopopolo.

Some portions of Artichoke are derived from third party sources. The READMEs in each workspace crate discuss which third party licenses are applicable to the sources and derived works in Artichoke.