From: Alex Fulton <a.fulton@...>
Date: 2008-12-12T07:59:39+09:00
Subject: Invoking Ruby code from a low-level language?

Hi, my sincerest apologies if this question has already been answered
somewhere, but google didn't turn anything up...

I'm working on a small university research project which is trying to
create a network weathermap by creating a large distributed P2P network
of clients installed on ordinary users' home computers, and collecting
data by running traces etc between the different peers.

We want to use a high-level language and GUI library for the interface,
and FXRuby seems to be a good option for this, but, due to the sort of
computers this client is going to be deployed on (home users,
predominantly Windows, probably not tech-savvy and reluctant to make any
changes to their systems), most of them will probably not have a Ruby
interpreter installed. Rather than forcing people to download Ruby and
Fox and install them themselves, in addition to installing our client,
we would prefer to be able to bundle the Ruby interpreter and GUI
libraries into our application (as dynamic libraries or something) and
then write most of the program in C (the startup code, the
communications layer, etc), and only have the user-interaction stuff
written in Ruby.

So, is it possible to have a C program that invokes Ruby code via an
interpreter library? I'm sure I've seen some apps do this with Python,
but I'm not sure if it's possible with Ruby or not...

Thanks,
Alex Fulton
(Computer Science department, University of Auckland, New Zealand)
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