If MacRuby is aiming for full FFI support, a la JRuby, then creating interpreter-independent versions of C extensions need not be difficult. I've begun porting some of my own Ruby bindings from DL and C and have found that as long as you handle your C types correctly, everything tends to Just Work on MRI versions 1.8.6, 1.9.1, and recent versions of JRuby. To my knowledge, the macruby-experimental branch only supports attaching C functions (e.g. no structs, callbacks), but that is likely to improve. The FFI documentation is also a little thin, but it's easy to pick up once you've seen some examples. Here's a CoreMIDI driver I've ported to FFI: http://github.com/jvoorhis/midiator/blob/4e6024b8e68503868272770d8c8ecabe02445f85/lib/midiator/drivers/core_midi.rb
Best, Jeremy On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 10:09 AM, Matt Aimonetti <mattaimone...@gmail.com>wrote: > Hi Tim, > > I was about to reply to your colleague, Mr Otero, so let me try to clarify > a few things that might help others. > The goal for MacRuby 0.5 is to be able to run any rubygems that are not C > extensions. ( see Macruby 0.5 roadmap: > http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macruby-devel/2009-July/002091.html) > > The good news is that the BioRuby gem is pure Ruby, the bad news is that > it's not fully compatible with Ruby 1.9 yet. (MacRuby is aiming for Ruby 1.9 > compatibility) However, that shouldn't be hard to fix. > > Regarding Rails, that's a different story, as you probably know, Rails 3 is > going to be released towards the end of the year. Rails is a big project and > quite a challenging one to have running on top of any Ruby implementation. > The primarily goal of MacRuby is to let people write Cocoa apps in Ruby, so > Rails is not at the top of the todo list. > However, this is something we would really like to be able to do ASAP. > (being part of the Rails team, I would love to see that happen). > > Rails also uses some C based extensions like its DB drivers and we would > need to find workarounds. > > I hope it helps, > > - Matt > > > > On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 9:36 AM, Tim Rand <timra...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Hi Laurent and macruby-ists,I am thinking about taking on a rather >> ambitious project with macruby in the next year or so which would benefit >> from having access to existing ruby gems (like the bioruby gem and rails). >> Can anyone predict how general the ruby gem compatibility will be as macruby >> matures? I promise I won't hold anyone responsible for their speculation. >> Tim >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> MacRuby-devel mailing list >> MacRuby-devel@lists.macosforge.org >> http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macruby-devel >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > MacRuby-devel mailing list > MacRuby-devel@lists.macosforge.org > http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macruby-devel > >
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