From: Jason Roelofs <jameskilton@...>
Date: 2009-10-27T04:30:41+09:00
Subject: [ANN] rb++ / rbgccxml 0.9

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= What is rb++ / rbgccxml?

Rb++, rbgccxml, and rice compose a suite of tools that make wrapping C++
libraries into
Ruby extensions as simple as possible. This is built as a replacement for
SWIG-Ruby.

== What's New

rb++:
  - Core builder and writer systems rewritten to be much cleaner and easier
to work with
  - Functions with Callbacks
  - Automatic Typedef lookup of argument and return types
  - Class constants
  - Class instance variables
  - Auto generation of allocation strategies
  - Wrapping anonymous enumerations as constants
  - Command line arguments: --clean, --console, -v, -q
  - Caching to speed up parsing and building phases
  - Rice::Director
  - Exposing Default arguments

rbgccxml:
  - 1.9 compatible!
  - Switched parsing from hpricot to libxml-ruby
  - ArrayTypes
  - FunctionType (function pointers)
  - Class consts and instance variables
  - Node#to_s => Node#to_cpp
  - Node#file_name => Node#file
  - Arguments have values

plus numerous tweaks, bug fixes, etc. See the commit log for all the
details. There have been
a lot of API changes in both libraries since the last release.

== Notes

rbgccxml is 1.9 compatible, however, rb++ is not because Rice is not quite
there.

rb++ is also not functional on Windows at this time, would appreciate it if
someone wanted to look into this, otherwise I'm going to wait for the
One-Click team to finish their work on buildling Ruby with mingw.

== Project

Documentation: http://rbplusplus.rubyforge.org

Project Pages:

  rb++:     http://github.com/jameskilton/rbplusplus
  rbgccxml: http://github.com/jameskilton/rbgccxml

== Installation

This single command will grab the whole stack needed for rb++ to work.

  gem install rbplusplus

The stack includes four libraries: rb++, rbgccxml, gccxml_gem, and rice

== rb++

Rb++ makes it almost trivially easy to create Ruby extensions for C++
library. In the simplest of cases, there is no need to ever touch C++,
everything is done in a very simple and clean Ruby API.

== rbgccxml

RbGCCXML allows one to easily parse out and query C / C++ code. This library
uses GCC-XML to parse out the C / C++ code into XML, and then libxml-ruby to
parse and query that XML.

== gccxml_gem

GCC-XML (www.gccxml.org) is an application that takes takes the parse tree
of C / C++ and constructs a very parsable and queryable XML file with all
related information.

This gem includes a binary build of GCC-XML for supported platforms, to make
it trivially easy to install. Platforms currently supported are:

* Linux 32 & 64 bit
* Mac OS X
* Windows via Cygwin

Linux 32 and 64 bit gems are up. Windows and Mac will come later today.

== Rice

The Ruby Interface for C++ Extensions, it provides a C++ API for working
with ruby. More information
available at its project page:

  http://rice.rubyforge.org

== Other Libraries

* libxml-ruby (http://libxml.rubyforge.org/)
* test/spec

== Notes

Released under the MIT licence.

For those familiar with py++ / pygccxml, the similarities are in function
only. Rb++ / rbgccxml were written from scratch to take advantage of the
Ruby language to it's fullest.

Bugs, patches, feature requests, et al should be posted to the corresponding
project's Issues page on github.

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