From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2002-09-08T03:48:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby aesthetics

William Djaja Tjokroaminata wrote:
...
> In my case, as I develop in C, I have put a lot of data members in C
> struct instead of Ruby data hash, in which case name collision is
> impossible.  I still have not solved the puzzle of how to best create the
> C's struct so that we can mimic the Ruby object inheritance on the C
> side.  Probably the solution is to combine Ruby and C++ for large projects
> where C++ takes much of the load and Ruby is used more as an advance,
> programmable, interface?

There's one solution in the CShadow module in my cgen package on RAA. If 
you mix this guy into your base class, you can declare C attributes 
(with or without readers and writers) from your Ruby code. The 
attributes declared in a subclass X are inherited in any class Y < X, 
and they are allocated using Data_Make_Struct.

In addition to accessors (which handle type checking and conversion), 
the mixin will generate C code for mark/free, marshalling, and 
initialization (if you need it). You can add your own attribute classes. 
You can define methods using "inline" C code, with a handy interface to 
Ruby's rb_scan_args().

When you've finished with all your declarations, just call #commit on 
your class (which compiles and loads the dyn lib) and then you can 
instantiate and use the objects.