From: wael.khobalatte@...
Date: 2014-01-22T13:20:47+00:00
Subject: [ruby-core:59981] [ruby-trunk - misc #9438] Implementation naming

Issue #9438 has been updated by Mohamed Wael Khobalatte.


Yorick Peterse wrote:
> > Issue #9438 has been updated by Hiroshi SHIBATA.
>  > We should use "Ruby".
>  
>  This would imply that MRI is the only Ruby implementation, or at least
>  the only one that matters. I'd say this is very far from the truth as
>  there are quite a few different implementations out there. Rubinius and
>  JRuby are just two but there's also Maglev, Topaz and a few others.
>  
>  Stating that Ruby and MRI are the same would lead to confusion. Because
>  of this one might think that JRuby and MRI are the same things when in
>  reality they're not.
>  
>  In short, Ruby is the language and not the implementation. I could
>  create an implementation called CatRuby that's powered by cats, but that
>  wouldn't make Ruby and CatRuby identical to each other.

This seems to be a non-issue for most other languages. Usually a language X
and its *first* implementation are used interchangeably, and I would rather stick
to that, i.e. go with "Ruby", since its a common usage. Going out of your way to 
make sure people know which implementation is optimizing for a very small
subset of your users.   

----------------------------------------
misc #9438: Implementation naming
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/9438#change-44509

* Author: Zachary Scott
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: Zachary Scott
* Category: doc
* Target version: current: 2.2.0
----------------------------------------
There seems to be an unclear decision on what to call this implementation.

We should make a decision between CRuby and MRI and update relating documentation to use one of them.

This discussion is based off a [ticket on ruby-lang.org](https://github.com/ruby/www.ruby-lang.org/commit/9c315c3#commitcomment-5120340), but also affects ruby-trunk source code as MRI is mentioned periodically.



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