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Pretty cool tool, I used it to lookup system ruby.

Younger me loved that Apple used Ruby and that Ruby was “pre installed” on the Mac.

This of course was because macOS relies on Ruby for certain things. However as a more experienced dev, the system Ruby (which is almost always very outdated), really gets in the way especially for beginners.

Anyone have more background on system Ruby and why it’s in macOS?

2 comments

Back then macOS as a platform was quite polyglot with multiple scripting languages and bindings/bridges to ObjC. Being an OOTB dev box was a feature, notably with Web 2.0, and there was Rails right there as well as Apache too, and a thing called Mac OS X Server. IIRC they even had Java in there, with WebObjects, until the Oracle debacle.

Today on Tahoe, this is what remains:

    $ uname -sr
    Darwin 25.0.0
    $ /usr/bin/ruby --version
    ruby 2.6.10p210 (2022-04-12 revision 67958) [universal.arm64e-darwin25]
    $ /usr/bin/bundle --version
    Bundler version 1.17.2
    $ /usr/bin/gem --version
    3.0.3.1
    $ /usr/bin/rails 
    Rails is not currently installed on this system. To get the latest version, simply type:
    
        $ sudo gem install rails

    You can then rerun your "rails" command.

    $ perl -v
    This is perl 5, version 34, subversion 1 (v5.34.1) built for darwin-thread-multi-2level
    (with 2 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)

    $ python3 --version
    Python 3.9.6

One can note the irony of the most up to date of those being Perl, probably a testament to its insane backwards compatibility.

The most insane thing of them all insane things is that that Perl ships with DBIx::Class — in /System/Library/Perl/5.34, no less!

I'm wondering what in the world is the system using DBIx::Class for.

> the system Ruby (which is almost always very outdated), really gets in the way

This also applies to Perl and especially Python. While relying on system Perl is bad but not terrible (Perl is very backward compatible, has good versioning of features, ...), I always have to fight against Mac users that keep using the outdated system Python instead of pulling a new one from Brew. Don't use the system interpreters folks! This is not Linux

The advice applies to Linux, too. The interpreter that "comes with the system" is usually there to accommodate other software within the distribution that is powered by that interpreter, and it's not guaranteed to stay where it is as you like it, or update when you want it updated, because there might be an application keeping it from getting updated.

It really depends, though. On rolling releases such as Arch Linux it's basically the latest version most of the time, so you can often just roll with it and get stuff done. On Debian and the like, absolutely, you shouldn't be using the system wide interpreters