Anyolite

Anyolite is a Crystal shard which adds a fully functional mruby (or even regular Ruby) interpreter to Crystal.

Description

Anyolite allows for wrapping Crystal classes and functions into Ruby with little effort. This way, Ruby can be used as a scripting language to Crystal projects, with the major advantage of a similar syntax.

Useful links for an overview:

• Demo project: https://github.com/Anyolite/ScapoLite
• Wiki: https://github.com/Anyolite/anyolite/wiki
• Documentation: https://anyolite.github.io/anyolite

Features

• Bindings to an mruby interpreter
• Near complete support to regular Ruby as alternative implementation (also known as MRI or CRuby)
• Wrapping of nearly arbitrary Crystal classes and methods to Ruby
• Easy syntax without unnecessary boilerplate code
• Simple system to prevent garbage collector conflicts
• Support for keyword arguments and default values
• Objects, arrays, hashes, structs, enums and unions as function arguments and return values are completely valid
• Ruby methods can be called at runtime as long as all their possible return value types are known
• Ruby closures can be handled as regular variables
• Methods and constants can be excluded, modified or renamed with annotations
• Options to compile scripts directly into the executable

Prerequisites

You need to have the following programs installed (and in your PATH variable, if you are on Windows):

• Ruby (for building mruby)
• Rake (for building the whole project)
• Git (for downloading mruby)
• GCC or Microsoft Visual Studio 19 (for building the object files required for Anyolite, depending on your OS)

Using regular Ruby instead of mruby

It is possible to use Anyolite with regular Ruby (MRI) instead of mruby. An instruction to install MRI can be found at Using Ruby instead of mruby in the wiki.

Installing

Put this shard as a requirement into your shard.yml project file and then call

shards install

from a terminal.

Alternatively, you can clone this repository into the lib folder of your project and run

rake build_shard

manually from a terminal or the MSVC Developer Console (on Windows) to install the shard without using the crystal shards program.

If you want to use other options for Anyolite, visit Changing build configurations in the wiki.

How to use

Imagine a Crystal class for a really bad RPG:

module RPGTest
  class Entity
    property hp : Int32

    def initialize(@hp : Int32)
    end

    def damage(diff : Int32)
      @hp -= diff
    end

    def yell(sound : String, loud : Bool = false)
      if loud
        puts "Entity yelled: #{sound.upcase}"
      else
        puts "Entity yelled: #{sound}"
      end
    end

    def absorb_hp_from(other : Entity)
      @hp += other.hp
      other.hp = 0
    end
  end
end

Now, you want to wrap this class in Ruby. All you need to do is to execute the following code in Crystal (current commit; see documentation page for the version of the latest release):

require "anyolite"

Anyolite::RbInterpreter.create do |rb|
  Anyolite.wrap(rb, RPGTest)

  rb.load_script_from_file("examples/hp_example.rb")
end

Well, that's it already. The last line in the block calls the following example script:

a = RPGTest::Entity.new(hp: 20)
a.damage(diff: 13)
puts a.hp

b = RPGTest::Entity.new(hp: 10)
a.absorb_hp_from(other: b)
puts a.hp
puts b.hp
b.yell(sound: 'Ouch, you stole my HP!', loud: true)
a.yell(sound: 'Well, take better care of your public attributes!')

The example above gives a good overview over the things you can already do with Anyolite. More features will be added in the future.

Limitations

See Limitations and solutions in the Wiki section for a detailed list.

Why this name?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyolite

In short, it is a rare variant of the crystalline mineral called zoisite, with ruby and other crystal shards (of pargasite) embedded.

The term 'anyoli' means 'green' in the Maasai language, thus naming 'anyolite'.

Roadmap

Upcoming releases

Version 1.1.2

Bugfixes

• Fixed broken documentation
• Fixed pointers not working as regular arguments

Version 2.0.0

IMPORTANT: Version 2.0.0 will introduce breaking changes to improve the general user experience.

This means that the build process and some parts of the API will change. There will be a dedicated section in the Wiki for migrating from Anyolite 1 to Anyolite 2, so compatibility can easily be restored.

The list of features for Anyolite 2 will expand over time, while development on Anyolite 1 continues until Anyolite 2 is released.

Breaking changes

• Discard postinstall option in favor of more sophisticated build script
• Simplify building with custom options
• Set optional arguments being keywords for method as default
• Add option for using either dynamic or static linking

Usability

• Add Wiki section about migrating from Anyolite 1
• Add error messages when using wrong annotation syntax

Later releases

• Automated generation of Ruby documentations for wrapped functions
• MRI support on Windows (does currently not work for some reason)
• MRI support for version 3.1.0 and up
• Support and continuous integration for Mac
• Support for bindings using Data and Struct from Ruby
• Multiple interpreters for mruby
• Add option to make script calls thread-safe

Wishlist, entries might not be possible to implement

• Splat argument and/or arbitrary keyword passing
• Support for slices and bytes
• Classes as argument type
• Resolve context even in generic type union arguments
• General improvement of type resolution
• Bignum support
• Range support