From: Gennady Bystritsky <gfb@...>
Date: 2004-12-28T03:59:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Bare-bones Ruby

Get yourself a copy of "Programming Ruby" (Pickaxe) by Dave Thomas and 
you find the answers for ALL your questions. And you will enjoy reading 
it too ;-)

>
> 1) Is it possible to build Ruby without those modules? How?

After you build ruby you can use just a ruby executable without the 
standard library if you do not need the functionality it provides. As 
for built-in classes and modules, such as String, you will not be able 
to get without them as they are implemented internally in C and other 
parts of Ruby depend on them heavily.

> 2) How do I embed Ruby in a host program?

The book I mentioned has a very good chapter on embedding Ruby.

> 3) What are the functions that must be called to make Ruby load a 
> program,
> to create an instance of a class defined in Ruby, to call methods with 
> this
> instance etc.? Is this API documented somewhere?

I did not quite get the question, but if you mean the API between Ruby 
and extensions written in C, Pickaxe discusses it in great details too.

> 4) Does Ruby support multiple inheritance or something similar to 
> Java's
> interfaces?

Ruby has mix-ins, implemented with modules. As for Java-like 
interfaces, you can easily do without them in Ruby, as Ruby uses so 
called duck-typing (see Pickaxe for details).

>
> Best regards,
>
> Andre de Leiradella
>
>

Sincerely,
Gennady Bystritsky