Tools

The Robot Co-op, the team behind 43things, has released several great Ruby libraries for free, all available as gems. Here are some of the highlights:

There are a few efforts to develop crossovers between .Net and Ruby, but Ruby.NET one that is creating a compiler for the Ruby language that targets the .NET CLR in much the same way as JRuby targets the Java Virtual Machine. This particular implementation is unique in that it can pass all 871 tests in the samples/test.rb of Ruby 1.8.2.

The Charming Ruby Compiler is charming not just by name, but by nature. It's a thesis project at the Computer Science Department at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden to develop a proof of concept Ruby compiler that compiles to the C-- intermediate language. So far, they've only got the basics working, but it's an interesting project, if only to learn about C--, an interesting 'portable assembly language' that makes life easier for compiler developers. It seems a little like Parrot, and is funded by Microsoft Research and the National Science Foundation.

Tar2RubyScript is a tool that packages up your entire Rails application into a single tar file with a special loader so that users can get up and running with one click.