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

[Laurent Sansonetti]

On Jun 3, 2009, at 6:30 PM, Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:

> 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.

Excellent!

OpenSSL might be way harder given the richness of its API (as well as  
the fact that every release seems to introduce API breakage).

>> 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.


What about creating a list somewhere of popular C extensions that we  
would like to see ported? This way volunteers would have a TODO list.

I googled a little bit but I wasn't able to find an existing list.

It looks like the Ruby-FFI official homepage is http://kenai.com/projects/ruby-ffi/pages/Home 
, it does contain a "projects using FFI" page but it's not very  
complete. I will google more and try to fix the page, first (any help  
is welcome :)).

Laurent