I read a post 25,000+ Req/s for Rack JSON API with MRuby. It’s really shock me, so I did some research on mruby.

What is mruby?

These are two explaination on it:

  • mruby is the lightweight implementation of the Ruby language complying with part of the ISO standard.(mruby.org)

  • mruby is an interpreter for the Ruby programming language with the intention of being lightweight and easily embeddable.(wikipedia)

It’s still confused. Keep reading and finally you will know what do this mean.

How to start use it?

It’s quite easy to start it, just three steps:

  1. git clone git://github.com/mruby/mruby.git

  2. cd mruby

  3. make (make command will generate bin/ and build/ fold，you should edit build_config.rb depend on your c compiler. You can refer to Compile mruby)

How to use it?

I think this is the most important problem, after you figure out this, you will know what is mruby exactly. Please refer to Executing Ruby code with mruby

Conclusion

I think mruby provide the ability to embed ruby code to c code in order to embed to the system support c extention. And this is the alphabet ‘m’ come from.