From: Lyle Johnson <ljohnson@...>
Date: 2001-11-30T04:35:09+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:26949] Re: Interfacing to a C++ library (was: overload possible?)

> I was surprised at how difficult it was to write a clean
> wrapper to a C++ library. It's not that Ruby itself makes
> it hard. It's that you have two inheritance trees--one in
> C++ and another in Ruby.

As the author of another Ruby interface to a C++ library, let me be the
first to say "ditto". Tools like SWIG make a lot of the tedious work
automatic, but it doesn't handle issues like routing virtual function calls
down to Ruby classes which are derived from your (wrapped) C++ classes. And
then, as you mentioned, being able to turn around and call the base class
version of that method using "super". The system I've got in place with
FXRuby works pretty well but it's a little difficult to explain; I suspect
you guys are doing something similar with Ruby/FLTK. I need to snoop around
your code sometime soon and see if I can learn any new tricks ;)