From: Coey Minear <cminear@...>
Date: 2009-02-03T00:44:53+09:00
Subject: Re: Native gem roundup!

Charles Oliver Nutter writes:
 > I'm curious what native gems/extensions people are typically using. In 
 > general it seems like most native extensions fall into two categories:
 > 
 > * They are wrappers around a C API/library, as in zlib, rmagick, nokogiri
 > * They are written for performance reasons, to implement a particular 
 > algorithm in a native language or call a library for the same reasons
 > 
 > And there's a lot of grey area, with some extensions falling in both 
 > categories.
 > 
 > Wrappers can now largely be handled by FFI, and I hope more and more of 
 > them will use FFI as needed to access those libraries. But I'm concerned 
 > about extensions written for performance, since Ruby 1.9 and JRuby do 
 > almost as much to speed Ruby up.
 > 
 > Ultimately, my quest is to eliminate Ruby's dependence on extensions for 
 > things FFI or "faster Ruby" could do, since it will improve the future 
 > for both the standard and alternative implementations.
 > 
 > So, what native gems or extensions do you use? Why do you use them or 
 > why do they exist?
 > 
 > - Charlie
 > 

For me, they would be FastCGI and ruby-postgres, two more examples of
wrapping a C library.  (Technically, I currently run FastCGI as
installed --- in 'site_ruby' --- rather than a gem; there was always a
hiccup if I tried to install it as a gem, so I went with the quickest
way to get it working.)  

As you may guess, this is a Rails application.  FastCGI is used for
Apache deployment; ruby-postgres is for accessing the PostgreSQL
database.  I know there are other options for Apache/web deployment
(e.g. Mongrel), but this install is stable and other priorities take
precedence over investigating alternative deployment configurations.
For PostgreSQL, even if I moved to ruby-pg, that is still a C library
wrapper. 

Anyways, just trying to answer your query.


-- 
Coey Minear