Winding Down Artichoke Ruby: A Journey from Toy to Rust Implementation
I am archiving Artichoke Ruby, a project that began as a toy to explore Rust and mruby but grew into a serious experiment. Over six years, I built a spec-compliant String in pure Rust and learned why the GIL exists. While the project achieved its educational goals, I lack the time to maintain compatibility with upstream Ruby. The code remains public for study, but active development has ended.
Build things. Even weird things. Even things that might not last forever. The act of building changes you.
- miki123211
> OpenAI is demanding
Just me, or are OpenAI and Anthropic basically hiring all the smart developers, like the Google of old? If you're making something like this, very likely that you're working for either OAI or Anthropic.
This makes the acquihires of Bun and Astral make a lot more sense. A Rust / Zig company attracts a special kind of crowd, and dev tools are notoriously hard to sell, so any exit is a good exit for them. I wouldn't be surprised if Zed or maybe Tigerbeetle were next (though the latter has a much clearer pathway to true commercial success).
- Levitating
I did some digging into Artichokes sourcecode to get inspiration for making a Ruby like language in Rust. But I found the codebase a bit complicated and ended up taking more inspiration from mruby instead. It's deeply segmented into different crates like many Rust projects are.
- bingemaker
The only implementation which is going head on with MRI is JRuby. I've heard from JRuby implementers that keeping the runtime compatible with MRI is an uphill battle. I don't know if AI can help this cause.