[MacRuby-devel] Contributions (Was: Experimental branch status)

[Charles Oliver Nutter]

Laurent Sansonetti wrote:
> Very good question... We currently need to access readline (for IRB), so 
> porting the readline extension to FFI will be very useful.

There's actually a (partial?) port of readline to FFI by Koichiro Ohba. 
I'll try to find out where it's located.

> Other extensions part of the Ruby distribution that might be interesting 
> to port: openssl, syslog, zlib.

syslog and zlib are also already ported to FFI.

> Other than that, I guess that once we start to be able to run larger 
> applications/libraries (like Rails for example) we might need to access 
> more native code, but this is more a future thing. I'm not a Rails 
> expert but I guess we will need access to sqlite3, mysql, etc. which are 
> surely wrapped into C extensions for now. Porting these to FFI might 
> help too.

I'd love to see them ported to FFI too.

Other than core extensions, I'd say start looking at the most popular 
gems and pick the first one on the list that's a C extension. Port it, 
and repeat with the next one.

- Charlie