Ruby is a multiplatform, freely distributed, feature rich and open source command-line software that has been designed from the ground up to provide a powerful programming language for developers who want to build application in Ruby.
Features, lots of features
Key features include a simple syntax inspired by Ada and Eiffel, operating system independent threading, exception handling capabilities for handling errors, numerous operators, a pure and complete object oriented language, as well as support for adding methods to a class.
Additionally, Ruby features a single inheritance only, true closures, blocks in its syntax, a true mark-and-sweep garbage collector, support for writing C extensions, integers, support for loading extension libraries dynamically, and it doesn’t need variable declarations.
Getting started with Ruby
Installing the Ruby programming language on a GNU/Linux operating system is a very easy task, as the package is available for download on all major distributions, directly from their main software repositories. Use the built-in Software Center app to install it.
As an alternative, the latest version can be installed using the source package, which is distributed for free on Softpedia. Simply download it and save it on your Home directory, extract the archive and navigate to the location of the extracted archive files in a terminal emulator app (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/ruby-2.2.0).
Run the ‘./configure’ command to configure the project (you can use the ‘./configure –help’ command to view available options for optimizing Ruby for a specific hardware architecture). Then, run the ‘make’ command to compile it and the ‘sudo make install’ command to install it.
Supported on GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS and OS/2
Ruby is a cross-platform software that can be successfully used on all GNU/Linux distributions, as well as on any UNIX-like operating system, including Mac OS X, BeOS, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows. It is compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit computer platforms.
