mruby is a lightweight Ruby implementation designed for embedding in C and resource-constrained applications. It provides a compact bytecode virtual machine and C API for adding scripting to games, devices, and native software.
💡 Pick it for a smaller, more mature embedded scripting runtime with a strong C API.
Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description.
Ruby core team
💡 Pick it when Ruby compatibility and ecosystem breadth matter more than a small embedded footprint.
CRuby is the reference implementation of the Ruby programming language, commonly distributed simply as Ruby. It is intended for general-purpose Ruby development...
Free, open source
JRuby contributors
💡 Pick it when you need Ruby integrated with Java libraries, JVM operations, or parallel server workloads.
JRuby is a Ruby implementation running on the Java Virtual Machine. It targets developers who need Ruby syntax and libraries alongside Java...
Free, open source
GraalVM Community
💡 Pick it for high-performance Ruby applications that can use GraalVM rather than a minimal embedded VM.
TruffleRuby is a high-performance Ruby implementation built on GraalVM's Truffle and compiler technologies. It is aimed at running Ruby applications with JVM...
Free, open source
💡 Pick it when embedded hardware support and Python familiarity outweigh Ruby compatibility.
MicroPython is a lean and efficient implementation of the Python 3 programming language that includes a small subset of the Python standard...
Open-source and free
💡 Pick it for an embeddable modern JavaScript runtime with a compact native footprint.
QuickJS is a small and embeddable JavaScript engine with a focus on performance and a small memory footprint.
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