Extending Ruby in C

We found that the README.ext from Ruby's source distribution is not comfortable to read so we decided to mirror it on our site with proper formatting and some helpful additions: Ruby1.8 extension API.

More Ruby Resources

Community

official Ruby home
Ruby Forum mirrors the ruby-talk mailing list.
Ruby Application Archive
Wikipedia article on Ruby

Different Implementations

JRuby A very complete implementation of the interpreter in Java.
YARV The site of the virtual machine which has been merged into 1.9.
Ruby.NET Still incomplete and unoptimized .NET compiler for Ruby.
Rubinious An implementation based loosely on the Smalltalk-80 VM architecture.
Iron Ruby This implementation by Microsoft has been presented but not yet released.

Documentation

Ruby Tutorial
Programming Ruby Free online version of the legendary "Pickaxe".
CORE
STDLIB
CORE-1.9
The Ruby Hacking Guide English translation of the japanese book by Minero Aoki. The translation is not yet finished.
C API doxygen docs
Ruby Syntax

GUI Toolkit Bindings

FXRuby Ruby bindings to the FOX Toolkit. A GUI designer is available too: FoxGUIb.
WxRuby
GTK
Ruby-Qt

The Future of Ruby

Yukihiro Matsumoto's C implementation of Ruby aka MRI (Version 1.8) is now considered the Quasi-Standard of the Ruby Language because there has never been an explicit language standard for Ruby. As the number of implementations grows a standard seems to become necessary to prevent the horror szenario of totally incompatible interpreters. Read on ...

Currently there are many different implementations of Ruby1.8 which are more or less complete:

Ruby 1.9

List of differences between 1.8 and 1.9 by David Flanagan