From: Lyle Johnson <lyle@...>
Date: 2002-08-21T08:51:09+09:00
Subject: Re: What makes a "good" Ruby extension?

Tim Hunter wrote:

> So I'm reading the "Comparing Gui Toolkits" wiki page
> (http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?ComparingGuiToolkits) and I notice that
> the author characterizes one of the Ruby interfaces as "Perl-like" and
> another as "immature." As someone who's been busy beavering away at his
> own Ruby interface to an existing C library for some months now, I'm wondering,
> just what makes a "good" Ruby interface? (After all, I don't want to 
> embarrass myself by offering a bad one to the Ruby community :-)

I think this is a question that a lot of Ruby programmers struggle with, 
especially if they've come to Ruby after a long history with some other 
programming language. Despite efforts like this:

	http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?RubyStyleGuide

there's not really a "checklist" out there to compare your work to (and 
I don't think anyone wants that anyways).

Perhaps your best bet, then, is to study Ruby code that *others* have 
pointed to as exemplary of "The Ruby Way". That certainly includes 
looking at the sources from Ruby's standard library, but a lot of code 
from the Ruby community falls into this category as well. For example, 
many people have pointed to Sean Russell's REXML library:

	http://www.germane-software.com/software/rexml

as a very intuitive (read: "Ruby-like") interface. I hope others reading 
this thread might throw in their $0.02 about other good examples (for my 
benefit ;)

> Going by my own standards for software, I'm assuming that a good Ruby interface should be:
> 
> 1) usable, that is, not buggy, reasonably efficient, and predictable
> 2) complete, that is, provides a complete interface to whatever it's interfacing with
> 3) documented, (no point having an interface that you can't figure out) and
> 4) supported, so you have some hope of getting bugs fixed, etc. 

Well, yes. I guess those things are important too ;)