[ruby-talk:8379] Re: Something like Perl's Inline module for Ruby?

Phil Tomson wrote:

> I sent an email to the author of Inline.pm to ask if he could create a
> flavor for Ruby (to allow the insertion of Ruby code into a perl script)
> and he replied that he was just looking into Ruby and was very
> enthusiastic about the language so far.  And in fact he is planning to do
> the next flavor of Inline for Ruby! (Inline::Ruby).  He raised an

Hi all. My name is Brian Ingerson. As Phil stated, I have written a perl 
module called Inline.pm that lets you write Perl subroutines/methods in 
other languages like C, C++, and Python (so far). Inline handles all of 
underlying details so that you can write something like:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Inline C => <<END;
void JAxH(char* name) {
     printf("Just Another %s Hacker", name);
}
END
JAxH('Ruby');

and then just run the script and it will print "Just Another Ruby 
Hacker". The first time it runs, Inline will silently compile a shared 
object. Subsequent runs will reuse that object (run fast).

The point of this is to make it very easy to extend Perl with C. For 
more info/examples of Inline see 
http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=module&query=inline%3A%3A

I have only been playing around with Ruby for about 5 days now, but I 
really like it. I have decided to start working on an Inline::Ruby 
module to add Ruby support to Inline. This would allow you to write Ruby 
directly into a Perl script and then call the Ruby methods from Perl. 
Something like:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Inline Ruby;
JAxH('Ruby');
__END__
__Ruby__
def JAxH(name)
     puts "Just Another #{name} Hacker"
end

I've browsed through the Ruby extension docs and the internals look 
pretty friendly. Neil Watkiss has already done Inline::Python so that 
will be a good starting point. The hard part will be making sure that 
the bindings are done in a way that makes good sense to both Ruby and 
Perl programmers. I'm definitely a Nuby.

If anyone in this group would be interested in helping out or even 
authoring this module I would be happy to work with you. Join the Inline 
mailing list ( [e-mail] ) by sending mail to 
[e-mail]. When this module is done I will turn over 
ownership to whomever wants to maintain it.

> interesting point: It would actually be much more useful to have a way to
> inline perl code in your Ruby scripts - that way you could call your
> legacy perl code from Ruby.  Is there any facility for doing this now?  Is
> this kind of what the Perl.pm module does 
> (see: http://www.yoshidam.net/Ruby.html )?

Ruby builds on Perl, as Perl builds on C. So it seems to me that having 
an Inline feature for Ruby would be more useful than Inline::Ruby for 
Perl. If there is anyone interested in writing an Inline (primarily for 
C extensions) facility for Ruby, I'd be glad to help out as well.

Cheers, Brian