The Ruby Intermediate Language

Ruby is a popular, dynamic scripting language that aims to "Feel natural to programmers" and give users the "Freedom to choose" among many different ways of doing the same thing. While this arguably makes programming in Ruby easier, it makes it hard to build analysis and transformation tools that operate on Ruby source code. In this paper, the authors present the Ruby Intermediate Language (RIL), a Ruby front-end and intermediate representation that addresses these challenges. Their system includes an extensible GLR parser for Ruby, and an automatic translation into RIL, an easy-to-analyze intermediate form.