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go-ruby-abbrev documentation

Ruby's abbrev — unambiguous prefix abbreviations — in pure Go, MRI-compatible, no cgo.

go-ruby-abbrev/abbrev is a faithful, pure-Go (zero cgo) reimplementation of Ruby's abbrev unambiguous-prefix library, matching reference Ruby (MRI) byte-for-byte. The module path is github.com/go-ruby-abbrev/abbrev.

It is a standalone, reusable library: the module is importable by any Go program, and it is the backend bound into go-embedded-ruby by rbgo as a native module — just like go-ruby-regexp and go-ruby-erb. The dependency runs the other way: this library has no dependency on the Ruby runtime.

Status: complete — MRI byte-exact

A faithful, byte-for-byte port of upstream abbrev.rb (Akinori MUSHA): a single Abbrev(words, prefix...) covering both Abbrev.abbrev and the Array#abbrev core extension. It computes every unambiguous prefix plus each full word, with the optional literal-string prefix filter, and reproduces MRI's edge cases — ambiguous prefixes dropped, empty and duplicate words, and multibyte words split on characters. Validated by a differential oracle against the system ruby / Abbrev.abbrev at 100% coverage, gofmt + go vet clean, CI green across the six 64-bit Go targets and three OSes.

Quick taste

abbrev.Abbrev([]string{"ruby", "rules"})
// => {"rub":"ruby", "ruby":"ruby", "rule":"rules", "rules":"rules"}
// "r" and "ru" are omitted: each is a prefix of both words (ambiguous).

abbrev.Abbrev([]string{"car", "cone"}, "ca")
// => {"ca":"car", "car":"car"}   (the optional prefix keeps only words starting with it)

Repositories

Repo What it is
abbrev the library — Ruby's abbrev unambiguous-prefix library in pure Go
docs this documentation site (MkDocs Material, versioned with mike)
go-ruby-abbrev.github.io the organization landing page (Hugo)
brand logo and brand assets

Principles

  • Pure Go, CGO_ENABLED=0 — trivial cross-compilation, a single static binary, no C toolchain.
  • MRI byte-exact. Output matches reference Ruby exactly, not approximately, validated by a differential oracle against the ruby binary.
  • Standalone & reusable. No dependency on the Ruby runtime — the dependency runs the other way.
  • 100% test coverage is the target, enforced as a CI gate.

Where to go next

  • Why pure Go — why this slice of Ruby is deterministic enough to live as a standalone, interpreter-independent Go library.
  • Usage & API — the public surface and worked examples.
  • Roadmap — what is done and what is downstream by design.

Source lives at github.com/go-ruby-abbrev/abbrev.