Ruby Under a Microscope

In Ruby Under a Microscope I’m going to teach you how Ruby works internally. I’ll use a series of simple, easy to understand diagrams that will show you what is happening on the inside when you run a Ruby program. Like a physicist or chemist, I’ve developed a theory about how things actually work based on many hours of research and study. I’ve done the hard work of reading and understanding Ruby’s internal C source code so you don’t have to. But, like any scientist, I know that theory is worthless without some hard evidence to back it up. Therefore after explaining some aspect of Ruby internals, some feature or behavior of the language, I’ll perform an experiment to prove that my theory was correct. To do this I’ll use Ruby to test itself! I’ll run some small Ruby test scripts to see whether they produce the expected output or whether they run as fast or as slowly as I expect. We’ll find out if Ruby actually behaves the way my theory says it should. Since these experiments are written in simple Ruby, you can try them yourself.