ruby/prism

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1039 stars · 196 forks observed · 2026-10-20

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Prism is a portable, error-tolerant parser for the Ruby programming language written in dependency-free C99. It provides a shared library (libprism) with bindings for Ruby, Rust, Java, and JavaScript/WASM, and is bundled with CRuby 3.3+.

Use cases

• parse Ruby source code into an AST
• build Ruby linters or static analysis tools
• lex and tokenize Ruby files
• run a Ruby parser in the browser via WASM
• parse Ruby code from Rust or Java
• handle syntax errors gracefully in Ruby tooling

When to choose

• you need a fast, dependency-free Ruby parser
• you're building developer tooling for Ruby (linters, formatters, analyzers)
• you need error-tolerant parsing of incomplete or invalid Ruby code
• you need Ruby parsing in a non-Ruby language or in the browser

When to avoid

• you need a full Ruby interpreter or runtime, not just a parser
• you're on CRuby < 3.3 and can't install gems
• you need to evaluate or execute Ruby code

Facets

library · maturity stable

parser compiler developer-tools cli serialization programming-languages parsers developer-tools c ruby rust jvm wasm cross-platform cli ruby-parser ast lexer error-tolerant c99 language-tooling syntax-tree command-line

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="ruby/prism")