The why’s and how’s of transpiling Ruby

Transpiling is a source-to-source compiling. Why might we need it in Ruby? Compatibility and experiments.

Ruby is evolving fast nowadays. The latest MRI release introduced, for example, the pattern matching syntax. Unfortunately, not everyone is ready to use it yet: gems authors have to support older versions, Ruby implementations are lagging. And it’s still experimental, which raises the question: how to evaluate proposals? By backporting them to older Rubies!

I want to discuss these problems and share the story of the Ruby transpiler — Ruby Next. A decent amount of Ruby hackery is guaranteed.