mruby-mruby/doc/limitations.md

Limitations and Differences

The philosophy of mruby is to be a lightweight implementation of the Ruby ISO standard. These two objectives are partially contradicting. Ruby is an expressive language with complex implementation details which are difficult to implement in a lightweight manner. To cope with this, limitations to the "Ruby Compatibility" are defined.

This document is collecting these limitations.

Integrity

This document does not contain a complete list of limitations. Please help to improve it by submitting your findings.

1/2 gives 0.5

Since mruby does not have Bignum, bigger integers are represented by Float numbers. To enhance interoperability between Fixnum and Float, mruby provides Float#upto and other iterating methods for the Float class. As a side effect, 1/2 gives 0.5 not 0.

Array passed to puts

Passing an Array to puts results in different output.

puts [1,2,3]

Ruby [ruby 2.0.0p645 (2015-04-13 revision 50299)]

1
2
3

mruby [2.1.1 (2020-06-04)]

[1, 2, 3]

Kernel.raise in rescue clause

Kernel.raise without arguments does not raise the current exception within a rescue clause.

begin
  1 / 0
rescue
  raise
end

Ruby [ruby 2.0.0p645 (2015-04-13 revision 50299)]

ZeroDivisionError is raised.

mruby [2.1.1 (2020-06-04)]

No exception is raised.

Fiber execution can't cross C function boundary

mruby's Fiber is implemented in a similar way to Lua's co-routine. This results in the consequence that you can't switch context within C functions. Only exception is mrb_fiber_yield at return.

Array does not support instance variables

To reduce memory consumption Array does not support instance variables.

class Liste < Array
  def initialize(str = nil)
    @feld = str
  end
end

p Liste.new "foobar"

Ruby [ruby 2.0.0p645 (2015-04-13 revision 50299)]

[]

mruby [2.1.1 (2020-06-04)]

ArgumentError is raised.

Method visibility

For simplicity reasons no method visibility (public/private/protected) is supported. Those methods are defined but they are dummy methods.

class VisibleTest

  def public_method; end

  private
  def private_method; end

end

p VisibleTest.new.respond_to?(:private_method, false)
p VisibleTest.new.respond_to?(:private_method, true)

Ruby [ruby 2.0.0p645 (2015-04-13 revision 50299)]

false
true

mruby [2.1.1 (2020-06-04)]

true
true

Visibility Declaration

The declaration form of following visibility methods are not implemented.

• public
• private
• protected
• module_function

Especially, module_function method is not dummy, but no declaration form.

module TestModule
  module_function
  def test_func
    p 'test_func called'
  end

  test_func
end

p 'ok'

Ruby [ruby 2.5.5p157 (2019-03-15 revision 67260)]

ok

mruby [2.1.1 (2020-06-04)]

test.rb:8: undefined method 'test_func' (NoMethodError)

defined?

The defined? keyword is considered too complex to be fully implemented. It is recommended to use const_defined? and other reflection methods instead.

defined?(Foo)

Ruby [ruby 2.0.0p645 (2015-04-13 revision 50299)]

nil

mruby [2.1.1 (2020-06-04)]

NameError is raised.

alias on global variables

Aliasing a global variable works in CRuby but is not part of the ISO standard.

alias $a $__a__

Ruby [ruby 2.0.0p645 (2015-04-13 revision 50299)]

nil

mruby [2.1.1 (2020-06-04)]

Syntax error

Operator modification

An operator can't be overwritten by the user.

class String
  def +
  end
end

'a' + 'b'

Ruby [ruby 2.0.0p645 (2015-04-13 revision 50299)]

ArgumentError is raised. The re-defined + operator does not accept any arguments.

mruby [2.1.1 (2020-06-04)]

'ab' Behavior of the operator wasn't changed.

Kernel#binding is not supported

Kernel#binding method is not supported.

Ruby [ruby 2.5.1p57 (2018-03-29 revision 63029)]

$ ruby -e 'puts Proc.new {}.binding'
#<Binding:0x00000e9deabb9950>

mruby [2.1.1 (2020-06-04)]

$ ./bin/mruby -e 'puts Proc.new {}.binding'
trace (most recent call last):
        [0] -e:1
-e:1: undefined method 'binding' (NoMethodError)

Keyword arguments

mruby keyword arguments behave slightly different from CRuby 2.5 to make the behavior simpler and less confusing. Maybe in the future, the simpler behavior will be adopted to CRuby as well.

Ruby [ruby 2.5.1p57 (2018-03-29 revision 63029)]

$ ruby -e 'def m(*r,**k) p [r,k] end; m("a"=>1,:b=>2)'
[[{"a"=>1}], {:b=>2}]

mruby [mruby 2.1.1]

$ ./bin/mruby -e 'def m(*r,**k) p [r,k] end; m("a"=>1,:b=>2)'
trace (most recent call last):
	[0] -e:1
-e:1: keyword argument hash with non symbol keys (ArgumentError)

Argument Destructuring

def m(a,(b,c),d); p [a,b,c,d]; end
m(1,[2,3],4)  # => [1,2,3,4]

Destructured arguments (b and c in above example) cannot be accessed from the default expression of optional arguments and keyword arguments, since actual assignment is done after the evaluation of those default expressions. Thus:

def f(a,(b,c),d=b)
  p [a,b,c,d]
end
f(1,[2,3])

CRuby gives [1,2,3,nil]. mruby raises NoMethodError for b.

nil? redefinition in conditional expressions

Redefinition of nil? is ignored in conditional expressions.

a = "a"
def a.nil?
  true
end
puts(a.nil? ? "truthy" : "falsy")

Ruby outputs falsy. mruby outputs truthy.