Ruby Hacking Guide

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This book is intended for advanced readers.

The RHG is a book that explains how the ruby 1.7.x-1.8.x interpreter (the official C implementation of the Ruby language) works internally. The original book was based on the source code of ruby 1.7.3 so there are a few small differences to the current version of ruby. However, these differences may make the source code simpler to understand and the Ruby Hacking Guide is a good starting point before looking into the ruby source code. The version of the source code used can be downloaded here: http://i.loveruby.net/ja/rhg/ar/ruby-rhg.tar.gz.

This project is picking up from where Vincent Isambart and Clifford Escobar have left off[1], with the aim to translate the outstanding chapters to English to help Ruby hackers understand the internals of the MRI interpreter.

Coordinating Translation

This book is new and could use your help. We need help with proof-reading, content authoring, editing and more. This is a wiki, so feel free to join in our discussion group: http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-hacking-guide/topics

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction

Part 1: Objects

• Chapter 1: Ruby language minimum
• Chapter 2: Objects
• Chapter 3: Names and name tables
• Chapter 4: Classes and modules
• Chapter 5: Garbage collection
• Chapter 6: Variables and constants
• Chapter 7: Security

Part 2: Syntax analysis

• Chapter 8: Ruby language details
• Chapter 9: Yacc crash course
• Chapter 10: Parser
• Chapter 11: Context-dependent scanner
• Chapter 12: Syntax tree construction

Part 3: Evaluation

• Chapter 13: Structure of the evaluator
• Chapter 14: Context
• Chapter 15: Methods
• Chapter 16: Blocks
• Chapter 17: Dynamic evaluation

Part 4: Around the evaluator

• Chapter 18: Loading
• Chapter 19: Threads
• Final chapter: Ruby's future