Ruby as a standalone language

Question

I have been messing around with ruby on rails. But my questions is really simple. Is ruby used language used for desktop applications? I mean without Rails? Can it be combined with GUI packages and Graphics Libraries to create a game for example? I have read that ruby is based on C. So it will be fast right?

Answer 1

Is ruby used language used for desktop applications?

Yes it is.

I mean without Rails?

Yes.

Can it be combined with GUI packages and Graphics Libraries to create a game for example?

Yes it can be.

I have read that ruby is based on C. So it will be fast right?

No, it won't be "fast" in the same way C is fast, because that isn't the point of Ruby. Ruby isn't "based on" C in any sense. The interpreter which runs Ruby code may be written in C (there are many interpreters and not all of them are), but that has nothing to do with the language itself. C and Ruby are not really comparable and occupy completely different niches.

Answer 2

I've no experience in programs where speed is critical; however, from my experience, Ruby is fast enough for user applications with GUI, and differences are almost unnoticeable from other similar dynamical languages (Ruby 1.9 is even faster, sometimes).

There is a reason I don't name the "similar languages": I think languages benchmarks aren't useful at all. While the fact that Ruby is fast enough for general purpose programming will probably make you happy, I think it's more important that if you already know and like Ruby you will be more productive using it.

There are some limit cases Ruby will be even faster than C: your implementations in C for functions that are offered as methods in the Ruby core lang and std lib could be slower than the ones in Ruby VM. This is just to say, speed isn't usually a concern, unless you're actually well aware of a particular reason you should be concerned with speed.

Some nice GUI libraries are FXRuby and Shoes, a very easy library used in the Hackety Hack project to teach children to program. I usually use Tk when programming with Ruby and Python because it's included in the standard library and there is no need to install anything else.

For Gaming, you can try Gosu and Chingu; Gosu is probably the most actively developed Ruby Gaming Library, and Chingu is a nice collection of classes based on the foundations offered by Gosu. They've not got the nice community of other gaming libraries (e.g. Pygame) but you can easily start making little games with them.

Answer 3

Check out the Shoes GUI, it has different implementations, each one has a colorname, the most popular ared Red and Green Shoes, they are often used to make the kind of games you see also in Flash or regular javascript. They are fast enough for that kind of games. Some implementations even work with JRuby.

• Red Shoes
• Green Shows

Answer 4

Ruby is a language whose common implementation (e.g. ruby-1.9.3-pl94) is an interpreter coded in C. File main.c contains the main function in C which set up the Ruby VM implemented in C in file vm.c.

You could have several implementations of Ruby. I heard that some people wanted to re-implement Ruby above the Parrot VM (itself implemented in C); but that effort is perhaps still in progress. JRuby is a Ruby above the JVM.

Indeed interpreter vs compiler is not a sharp difference. Many interpreters contain a virtual machine with a translator (which you could view as a compiler) to that VM. Some VM implementations have a Just In Time dynamic translator to machine code. The JIT part produces machine code dynamically.

You could code a graphical application using e.g. Ruby-Gnome, a glue to Gnome and Gtk. You could also use Ruby Qt, a glue to KDE and Qt