The Ruby2JS Story: A Decade of Transpilation | Ruby2JS

Ruby2JS began in October 2013, forked from Marcos Castoria’s original maca/Ruby2JS project. The timing was notable: JavaScript was still in its ES5 era. Classes required prototype chain manipulation. Modules didn’t exist—you used AMD, CommonJS, or globals. Destructuring? Arrow functions? Forget it. The appeal of transpiling Ruby to JavaScript was straightforward: write elegant Ruby syntax and generate the verbose JavaScript that browsers understood.