From: leon breedt <bitserf@...>
Date: 2004-11-16T12:32:10+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby extension best practices

thanks for all the suggestions, SWIG seems to be closest to what i
want (the others seem to be fine for small amounts of interfacing, but
i want a fair amount of API coverage and with library data types
mapped to Ruby classes).

in short, i just want something that does the
Data_Wrap_Struct/Data_Get_Struct magic for me, as well as the C<->Ruby
type marshaling. SWIG would appear to have this as a goal, buti'm
having some problems with it.

the library uses opaque structs for the most part.

i can't seem to indicate that i want an opaque struct of a particular
type to be mapped to a Ruby class, and methods taking the opaque
struct pointer as an argument to become instance methods of that
class.

i tried this using %extend, but that errors out when given an opaque
struct, it wants a struct body, defeating the whole point of using
SWIG, and breaking the signature of library methods.

anyone have any experience with SWIG used like this?

leon