On Apr 3, 2008, at 10:59 AM, Paul Brannan wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 03, 2008 at 11:41:41PM +0900, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I met with Wayne Kelly (of Ruby.NET) at the JAOO RubyFools
>> conference.  That means I have met all primary developers of all  
>> major
>> Ruby implementations.  Yay.
>>
>> He asked me how we can distinguish the implementation from program.
>> Currently RUBY_PLATFORM gives you the platform the implementation is
>> on.  RUBY_VERSION gives you the version but it is the language
>> version.   Probably we need to introduce a new constant to represent
>> the implementation of the running VM.
>>
>> What do you think the constant name should be?
>> RUBY_IMPLEMENTATION?  Too long?
>
> Did he indicate what such a constant would be used for in a Ruby
> application?

I use RUBY_ENGINE in a few places in RubyGems to detect Rubinius vs.  
MRI to work around some Zlib issues (in both implementations) and to  
install into a separate gem repository.