From: Jeremy Hinegardner <jeremy@...>
Date: 2008-12-17T06:15:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Invoking Ruby code from a low-level language?

On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 05:22:10AM +0900, Alex Fulton wrote:
> Wow, thanks for the replies everyone. This has given me a lot of 
> material to get going on (and my boss is now getting irate because I'm 
> spending too much time researching options and not enough time actually 
> coding :P).
> 
> But I've done some research on embedding ruby interpreters (via ruby.h), 
> and while it seems like this task should be almost trivially easy, I 
> can't seem to find a copy of the actual embedded interpreter library and 
> headers. I did a search on my computer (a Mac) for ruby.h, and it turned 
> up some platform-specific ruby embedding stuff for making OSX apps, but 
> I'm interested in a more generic solution.
> 
> Any thoughts?

There isn't anything different to link against for the embedded ruby interpreter
vs the noral interpreter.  Its the same library libruby or libruby-static
depending on your compilation shared/static needs.  The ruby.h that you found is
probably the ruby.h that you need to look at.  On my Mac, the ruby.h is:

  mac shipped ruby : /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/universal-darwin9.0/ruby.h
  ports ruby       : /opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/i686-darwin9.5.0/ruby.h

One thing you could do to see how to build an application that uses embedded
ruby is to look at crate.  It is has a very thin wrapper around embedded
ruby.

  http://github.com/copiousfreetime/crate/tree/master/data/crate_boot.c

Pretty much everything I used to figure out embedded ruby was
http://metaeditor.sourceforge.net/embed/ and the 'Embedding a Ruby Interpreter'
section in the Programming Ruby 2nd ed.

hopefully that will help some.

enjoy,

-jeremy
-- 
========================================================================
 Jeremy Hinegardner                              jeremy@hinegardner.org