CRuby, MRI, JRuby, RubySpec, Rubinius, YARV: A Little Bit of Ruby Naming
/If you've spent a little time in Ruby-land, you have have encountered the names "CRuby" or "MRI". You've almost certainly heard of JRuby, and perhaps a few "other" Rubies like Rubinius, TruffleRuby and maybe even a few "exotic" Rubies like Opal, IronRuby, MacRuby or MagLev.
What are all of these?
CRuby (formerly MRI) Plus YARV
If you're using Ruby then you know about CRuby even if you don't know that name. The default Ruby, the one people think of as "just Ruby," is CRuby. We used to call it MRI for "Matz's Ruby Interpreter." Matz (who wrote Ruby) is a modest guy and Ruby is a team effort, so he has asked us to call it "CRuby." It's a Ruby interpreter written in C, so "CRuby" works. Fair enough.
CRuby's "under the hood" implementation has gone through several generations of technology. "YARV" stands for "Yet Another Ruby VM." YARV is the stack-based interpreter technology that CRuby 1.9 through 2.5 uses. It replaced the old-style "abstract syntax tree" interpreter from Ruby 1.8, long ago. And it looks like YARV may be augmented with a new generation of JIT-based interpreter/compiler technology called MJIT.
Ruby 1.8, YARV and MJIT are all CRuby, but they're different generations of tech within CRuby: the old Ruby 1.8 interpreter, then YARV, then MJIT.
Other Rubies
So if "CRuby" is "Ruby written in C," why do we have to specify? Isn't all Ruby written in C?
Nope.
JRuby is a Ruby interpreter written in Java. It's written and maintained by a different team. It focuses hard on performance - especially for long-running servers like web servers. It's far better for concurrency, especially multithreading. The garbage collection is more advanced, but JRuby uses far more memory and has much longer startup time. Don't write your tiny command-line apps in it! It also takes more warmup to get to full speed. JRuby has great compatibility with Java libraries, but has more trouble with the C libraries CRuby is good with. It's basically a whole different language project that happens to interpret exactly the same source code.
TruffleRuby is like JRuby but even more so - it's written in Java (along with Oracle's compiler-construction kit Truffle and Graal). It focuses hard on the performance of long-running servers. It uses even more memory, takes even longer to get to full speed, but gets even faster once it's fully warmed up. It grew out of JRuby, but is now its own project.
The other major non-CRuby "plain" Ruby is called Rubinius. It started as "Ruby in Ruby" - Ruby with as few C extensions as possible. For that reason, folks like the TruffleRuby team have used its standard library (easier to optimize than a C/Ruby hybrid!) Rubinius used to use an LLVM-based JIT implementation, though that's gone away recently.
There are a few other, mostly older, "alternate" Ruby implementations - OMR on IBM's compiler/interpreter toolkit, IronRuby for Ruby on .NET, MacRuby to run Ruby on the Objective C libraries, Opal for Ruby-transpiled-to-Javascript, MagLev for Ruby on a Smalltalk VM and many others. But JRuby, TruffleRuby and Rubinius are the current big three non-CRuby implementations.
(MacRuby eventually sank, but the code lives on in RubyMotion, a Ruby for writing cross-platform Mac and smartphone apps.)
RubySpec and What Counts as Ruby
How do we know that a different Ruby implementation "really" runs Ruby? What happens if two implementations disagree?
The short answer is: there's a language spec. Not only are there a few formal published industry specs for Ruby, but (more importantly to programmers) there's a *great* set of executable Ruby spec tests called RubySpec, which pretty much every Ruby implementation tests against.
Changes to the Ruby language turn into changes in RubySpec - so it can happen, but there's a central location for it and all the other Ruby implementations see all the changes. Ruby as an implementation-independent language is defined by RubySpec.
Naming
Now you know the names. More importantly, now you know there are more Rubies that do a few different things, and differences between one Ruby and another.
And if you're having any trouble figuring out "is that really Ruby?" you even know the definitive spec for that!