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!

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! Also take a look at good first issues.

We have a very quiet Discord server -- come and hang out!

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
• make
• gcc or clang
• Ruby 2.7.x or Ruby 3.0.x
• ccache (optional)

Install the above prerequisites on your platform, then run:

git clone https://github.com/seven1m/natalie
cd natalie
git submodule update --init
gem install bundler
bundle install
rake

NOTE: Currently, the default build is the "debug" build, since Nataile is in active development. But you can build in release mode with rake build_release.

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

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 rb file
docker run -it --rm --entrypoint bash natalie                        # bash prompt

Natalie is copyright 2021, Tim Morgan and contributors. Natalie is licensed under the MIT License; see the LICENSE file in this directory for the full text.

Some parts of this program are copied from other sources, and the copyright belongs to the respective owner:

See each file above for full copyright and license text.