From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2004-03-14T10:42:05+09:00
Subject: [ANN] CGenerator 0.11


Cgenerator 0.11
===============

What is it?
===========

Framework for dynamically generating C extensions from Ruby. Supports 
automatic management of C structs as ruby objects that:

  * have accessible, type-safe attributes
  * can be serialized via Marshal and YAML
  * are GC-aware
  * are fully inheritable and extensible with new attributes.

Who needs it?
=============

If you're starting a C extension from scratch, or if you need to 
dynamically generate and load C code on the fly, you may be interested. 
For wrapping an existing library, you should consider SWIG as well. SWIG 
has the advantage of being able to parse headers and generate something 
as a starting point. CGenerator has the advantage of automatically 
handling serialization and memory management, but it can handle only a 
limited (but extensible) range of C data types.

What's new?
===========

The most important change is that all shadow classes can now load and 
dump YAML strings (and they do so without generating any more C 
code--the dump/load code for attributes is generic enough to work with 
YAML as well as Marshal).

An example:

----
require 'cgen/cshadow'
require 'yaml'

CShadow.allow_yaml

class YamlExample
   include CShadow
   shadow_attr_accessor :x => "int x"
   shadow_attr_accessor :z => "double z"

   attr_accessor :a, :b

   def initialize(x, z, a, b)
     self.x = x
     self.z = z
     @a = a
     @b = b
   end
end

Dir.chdir('/tmp') do
   YamlExample.commit
end

obj = YamlExample.new(1,2.6, :AAA, "BBB")
y obj

obj2 = YAML.load(YAML.dump(obj))
y obj2

__END__

Output:

--- !ruby/cshadow:YamlExample
x: 1
z: 2.6
b: BBB
a: !ruby/sym AAA
--- !ruby/cshadow:YamlExample
x: 1
z: 2.6
b: BBB
a: !ruby/sym AAA