anyolite
Embed mruby or Ruby interpreters into Crystal projects to use Ruby as a scripting language with similar syntax.
What is anyolite?
Anyolite is a Crystal shard that integrates a fully functional mruby or Ruby interpreter into Crystal, allowing Crystal classes and functions to be wrapped and exposed to Ruby. It enables Ruby to serve as a scripting language for Crystal applications, leveraging their syntactic similarities for seamless interoperability.
Crystal developers who want to embed Ruby as a scripting language in their applications, particularly for scenarios like game development (e.g., RPGs), configuration scripting, or extending functionality with user-defined scripts.
Developers choose Anyolite for its minimal boilerplate syntax, garbage collector safety, and flexibility in handling complex data types like structs and enums across languages, making it easier to bridge Crystal and Ruby compared to manual bindings.
Overview
Embedded mruby/Ruby for Crystal
Use Cases
Best For
- Embedding Ruby scripting into Crystal-based game engines or RPG frameworks.
- Adding configuration or modding support to Crystal applications via Ruby scripts.
- Wrapping Crystal libraries for use in Ruby environments with minimal code changes.
- Prototyping or extending Crystal applications with dynamic Ruby code at runtime.
- Integrating Ruby's ecosystem (e.g., gems) into performance-critical Crystal projects.
- Creating hybrid applications where Crystal handles core logic and Ruby manages user-facing scripts.
Not Ideal For
- Applications requiring zero runtime overhead and maximum performance, as the Ruby interpreter adds latency.
- Teams on Windows needing full MRI Ruby support, since it's not currently functional on that OS.
- Projects with strict dependency management, due to the complex build process involving Ruby, Rake, Git, and a C compiler.
- Developers needing splat arguments or arbitrary keyword passing in Ruby bindings, as these are on the wishlist and not yet implemented.
Pros & Cons
Pros
The README demonstrates wrapping a Crystal class with just a few lines using `Anyolite.wrap`, emphasizing 'easy syntax without unnecessary boilerplate code.'
Includes a simple system to prevent conflicts between Crystal and Ruby garbage collectors, ensuring safe cross-language memory management as highlighted in the features.
Supports objects, arrays, hashes, structs, enums, and unions as function arguments and return values, allowing complex data interchange without manual conversion.
Methods and constants can be excluded, modified, or renamed with annotations, providing fine-grained control over the Ruby interface as described in the features.
Offers options to compile Ruby scripts directly into the executable, enabling standalone distribution without external script files, a key feature mentioned in the README.
Cons
Requires installation of Ruby, Rake, Git, and a C compiler (GCC or MSVC), making the initial setup more involved than typical Crystal shards, as noted in the prerequisites.
Version 2.0.0 will introduce breaking changes to the API and build process, necessitating migration efforts, which is explicitly warned in the roadmap.
MRI support on Windows does not currently work, restricting the use of regular Ruby in Windows environments, as admitted in the roadmap's limitations.
Features like splat arguments, slices support, and bignum are on the wishlist but not yet implemented, limiting some Ruby functionalities for advanced use cases.
Frequently Asked Questions
Related Projects
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crzFunctional programming library for https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal
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lua.crCrystal to Lua bridge
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