Welcome to Ruby. We Have Many Rubies.
Although I consider myself (and I’m proud to be) a polyglot, most of my open source code is Ruby. I’ve been a Rubyist for almost 5 years now and it is still my language of choice for starting projects. Professionally, I’ve begun to use Python in the work-place, and in the process of learning Python I’ve had a hard time understanding the various Python implementations. Additionally, I know friends coming to Ruby who have trouble understanding the reasoning behind all the different Ruby implementations.
As such, I’m going to give a brief overview of the major Rubies available, their purpose, their development status, and my opinion of them. I’ll cover Matz’s Ruby (MRI or CRuby), Ruby Enterprise Edition (REE), JRuby, Rubinius (rbx), MacRuby, IronRuby, and MagLev.
The world of Rubies is unlike other languages, such as Python, where I would guess 95%+ use CPython exclusively. It is not uncommon for a single Ruby developer to use Rubinius at home, JRuby for production deployment, and MacRuby for desktop development.
