From: Bryan Richardson <btricha@...>
Date: 2008-02-13T22:52:42+09:00
Subject: Re: Help Understanding Ruby/C Bindings

Thanks Jason for the response. It's just what I was looking for!

Bryan

On 2/12/08, Jason Roelofs <jameskilton@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 12, 2008 7:32 PM, Bryan Richardson <btrichardson@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello all,
> >
> > Can anyone walk me through how, for example, the binding between
> > libpcap-ruby and libpcap?  If I look at pcaplet and pcap_misc, I notice
> > that 'pcap' is required.  Is this another Ruby file (that I can't find)
> > or is this referencing the libpcap C library directly?
> >
> > If anyone can explain to me how this works I'd greatly appreciate it.
> > There's a good chance I'll need to be binding to C code from Ruby in the
> > near future and I'd like to understand the best way to go about doing
> > so.
> >
> > --
> > Thanks!
> > Bryan
> > --
> > Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
> >
> >
>
> Kernel#require can load both another Ruby file or a Ruby extension.
> Ruby extensions are shared libraries that are required to have at
> least one certain method in them:
>
> extension.c
>
> void Init_extension() {
>    ... initialization code here ...
> }
>
> builds into extension.so (on Linux, extension.dll on Windows)
>
> Then you can
>
> require 'extension'
>
> and start using whatever the library has made available. In the case
> of libpcap-ruby, there's a pcap.so file somewhere in your system (I'm
> assuming you apt-get installed it, or the related on your system)
> that's accessible by Ruby.
>
> That's the gist of it, for more detailed information, go here:
> http://www.rubycentral.com/pickaxe/ext_ruby.html
>
> Jason
>
>