This articles was published on 2017-02-02
4 Years of mruby GEMs
Lately I was quite occupied with many private and professional projects. Yet by now they have stabilized enough so that I can take time out for some side projects. So let’s have a look at mruby again.
Even though that I had a lot of projects using mruby in very different areas over the past four years, I lost track a bit about the latest development of mruby itself. For me mruby had already reached prime-time something like 3 years ago when a friend of mine released his first consumer product based on mruby. Since then I have used mruby to:
- build a 4G development platform based on an industrial SDR system
- provide a toolchain to simplify “digitalization” of machines used in factory automation
- implemented a mini-hypervisior in combination with OpenWRT
- and many other still ongoing research projects
So to keep-up with the latest changes I decided to start with a quick look at mruby’s GEMs and made a small graph of the historical growth of the quantity:
# mgem size Total # of GEMs: 227
Even though the count of 227 GEMs is tiny compared to Rubygems (which counts 128,547), for the niche mruby is trying to fill there is a constant extend of new libraries which are providing features necessary for using Ruby in the embedded world.
As we do not have any statistics of the usage of mruby GEMs I can’t say which are the most popular ones but as a matter of fact the IIJ collection belongs to the most frequent ones I’m using. Interestingly in the past, most GEMs were written only by a handful of people (very prominent next to IIJ was from my perspective matsumotory and mattn). Yet when I look today at new gems it seems this trend has stopped and many different contributors are adding GEMs for very different purposes. The current contributor count for the mgem-list has reached 65!
In the coming days and weeks I will look more into what else happened with mruby. Things I want to look at are:
- security improvements based on Spotify’s bug-hunting
- mruby/c (reduction of mruby interpreter for even smaller devices)
- general commit history
I would appreciate any kind of input from you if you know other interesting mruby relevant topics (use-cases, hacks, etc.) Just drop me a mail (daniel [at] bovensiepen [dot] net).