From: Austin Ziegler Date: 2005-10-01T12:06:55+09:00 Subject: Re: Interest in Boost::Ruby On 9/30/05, Alan Gutierrez wrote: > * Austin Ziegler [2005-09-30 21:41]: > > On 9/30/05, Alan Gutierrez wrote: >>> I'd like to build a CSS renderer in modern C++ as an enthusist's >>> pursuit. I don't want to get bogged down in huge build systems, or >>> many different IDEs. >> Just for what it's worth, after RubyConf, I hope to be working on a >> CSS engine. The purpose of this engine will be very limited -- >> applying CSS to SVG documents for proper rendering in PDF documents, >> but it will be written entirely in Ruby. > This is a pet of mine. It's supposed to be a fun way to learn some new > things, and a hopefully fun enough that people get others interested. Oh, I'm not in the least trying to discourage you from doing this. I'm just also pointing out that I will be doing a core CSS *engine* in Ruby intended for PDF output. > It's nice to have a clean specification like CSS to implement, so I > can focus on the implementation, rather than the interface. Heh, um. CSS is most certainly *not* a clean specification. It's implementable, sure, but there are certainly things that I will be ignoring in the spec -- it's a right mess, that spec. > My plan would be to create UI primitives in C++ first, and make then > available to Ruby. This rather than adopting Qt or Tk similiar, since > it would have a lot of things I don't need. > It would be great if there was a way to combine efforts. Well, the *main* problem is that the goal of my project(s) require a pure Ruby implementation -- I do C/C++ hacking for a living and don't want to hack at that on my spare time if I can help it. Additionally, it is my belief that at some point Ruby's speed will catch up to or exceed other scripting languages that it isn't really important to have C extensions for certain things. Finally, doing it in Ruby gives me the greatest portability -- it will run on any platform that Ruby itself does. -austin -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca