"I'm in two minds over his assertion that Ruby-FFI on JRuby is the way to go for Windows native library access: MRI with Ruby/DL can and does do the job, even if it's not the sexy new FFI goodness. But given that his topic was pretty dry he still managed to inject humour and interest."
I'm not sure where Gregory is getting that. If you have a C compiler, it's no more difficult to wrap native libraries on Windows than any other platform. Ruby/DL has issues, which is why I use win32-api. FFI is probably the way of the future, though, as it will work with MRI, JRuby and whatever other implementations crop up.
Well Ruby-FFI is definitely a project worth following and if it ever makes it into MRI's standard lib I'll probably switch to using it, but for all it's half-finished feel I'm rather fond of Ruby/DL. That's probably because I'd always wanted a Ruby malloc wrapper for various dumb projects I've mucked with - and every time I stand up in front of an audience and say "oh, and you know you can just malloc chunks of memory like in C" it always seems to put a smile on their faces.
Anyway judging from the win32 questions that pop up on ruby-talk at times there's still a lot more work needs to be done in integrating Ruby and Windows so perhaps Gregory's JRuby advice isn't so bad - the problem can then be pushed off to the JVM and existing Java libraries. Somebody else's problem :)
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I'm not sure where Gregory is getting that. If you have a C compiler, it's no more difficult to wrap native libraries on Windows than any other platform. Ruby/DL has issues, which is why I use win32-api. FFI is probably the way of the future, though, as it will work with MRI, JRuby and whatever other implementations crop up.
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Anyway judging from the win32 questions that pop up on ruby-talk at times there's still a lot more work needs to be done in integrating Ruby and Windows so perhaps Gregory's JRuby advice isn't so bad - the problem can then be pushed off to the JVM and existing Java libraries. Somebody else's problem :)
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