[ruby-talk:00843] Re: Ruby as an extension language ?

Hi,

In message "[ruby-talk:00839] Ruby as an extension language ?"
    on 99/10/03, Artur Matos <[e-mail]> writes:

|	I'm looking for an extension language (aka a macro language) for
|a large program i'm developing.  After seeing some alternatives, I think
|Ruby could make a nice extension language for my program. 

Quite possibly.

|	The problem is I don't find specific information for using
|Ruby this way, only as a standalone scripting language. Is
|it possible to use Ruby as an extension language ? If it is, I would like
|to know how : 
|
|	- to embeb the ruby interpreter in my program.
|	- to interface ruby with C/C++ calls. (specialy
|C++, as my program is written in C++)

Did you check out README.EXT file in the distribution?
Hope that helps, especially for the latter.

To embed the interpreter, First, you need to initialize the
interpreter by calling:

  ruby_init();

And then invoke the interpreter by calling

  rb_eval_string(str);

or

 rb_eval_string_protect(str, &status);

rb_eval_string_protect() does not jump out by the exception.  if the
exception raised it set the status variable to non-zero.  So you don't
have to protect against any global exits.

Because Ruby is written in C, you have to declare the prototypes of
the Ruby calling functions within  `extern "C"'.

                                                                matz.