From: Sean O'Halpin <sean.ohalpin@...>
Date: 2009-02-17T23:00:03+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] ffi-ncurses version 0.3.0

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Dominik Honnef <dominikho@gmx.net> wrote:
> Excuse the question, but what exactly is ffi-ncurses advantage over
> the already existing ncurses bindings for ruby?
> I admit that I dont really know much about the benefits of ffi.
> --
> Dominik Honnef
> dominikho@gmx.net

Hi Dominik,

In order of importance:

- The same code runs under both ruby 1.8.6 and JRuby 1.1.6
- The FFI implementation doesn't need a compiler on the target machine
(not such a big deal on Linux, but handy on a Mac without XTools)
- I intend to build a cross-platform text console library on top of
this and didn't want to use the existing Ncurses implementation which
hasn't been updated for a while and is a little idiosyncratic in its
mapping of the C API to ruby
- I wanted to learn to use the FFI :)

Regards,
Sean