From: Scott Gonyea <scott@...>
Date: 2010-11-09T06:09:33+09:00
Subject: Re: Using Ruby's C API safely and sanely

You should give some thought to using FFI. It'll work in ruby, rubinius, and jruby.

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 8, 2010, at 8:45 AM, Eric MSP Veith <eveith@wwweb-library.net> wrote:

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> Hello Rubyists!
> 
> I'm trying to integrate Ruby (both for bindings and embedded interpreter) 
> into a larger project, namely RPM 5. I'm facing several diffuclties there 
> and hope that somebody might point out a more elegant way of solving things.
> 
> First, querying Ruby's compile-time configuration is rather painful. RPM 5 
> uses Autoconf, and using extconf.rb as yet another layer of configuration 
> seems not the best way. Currently, we're using calls to "ruby -rrbconfig -e 
> puts CONFIG::expand ..." to get information like CFLAGS/include directories, 
> location of Ruby's library directories, and so on. Is there a better way to 
> do this? Sadly, Ruby doesn't come with a .pc file or something similar, and 
> a call like Perl's "perl -V:..." doesn't seem to be implemented, either?
> 
> Second, including the ruby.h file leads to the inclusion of Ruby's config.h 
> file. This is clearly not appreciated, as we need to cope with a lot of 
> HAVE_FOO_H defines, or even Ruby's PACKAGE_NAME, etc. definitions which of 
> course override RPM's. Is there a sane way of using Ruby's C API, i.e. 
> including the Ruby header file, without having Ruby wreak havok on our own 
> defines?
> 
> Thanks alot in advance. Every hint is greatly appreciated.
> 
>            Eric
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